


Lines in Ink

by Deisderium



Series: Lines in Ink [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Confusion, First Kiss, Healing, Identity Issues, M/M, Masturbation, On the Run, POV Bucky Barnes, Pining, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tattoos, What Bucky Was Doing Between Movies, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-12-10
Packaged: 2019-07-02 12:46:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 58,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15796824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deisderium/pseuds/Deisderium
Summary: Bucky Barnes remembers how he got his scars. That's why he wants to tattoo over them.





	1. 32557038 JBB

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's different, marked by everything that he's done, that's been done to him. His body is a landscape of scars. Not just the metal arm (though let's be clear; that's the capital city on the map of his hurts, marked with a big red star and everything), but the traces where bullets have passed through him, knives, faint lightning-marks from the electric current sent through him, a series of circles like meteor-strikes down his flesh arm, where some of his handlers had found amusement in burning him with cigarettes.
> 
> (Barnes remembers how he got his scars. He wants to tattoo over them.)

He gets his first tattoo in Atlanta.

  
The man at the front desk watches as he fills out the consent form--a fake name, but he's been living under it for a few weeks, so maybe no more fake than any other he's worn this century--and he manages to keep the thoughts of violence to himself. The front desk guy isn't a threat. The only pain here will be the pain he chooses.

The artist is a woman, her own arms brightly colored with full sleeves, bright birds and flowers and fantastical creatures, names and dates hidden among the foliage. The sight makes him smile--his own design seems so plain compared to the art wreathing her wrists and shoulders.

"First time getting ink?" she asks.

"Yes." He's not quite sure why he's sweating. He doesn't remember what nervous feels like. "I brought a drawing." He hands her the sheet torn from one of his notebooks. It's a clean copy of the fifth iteration, the first where the letters and numbers formed a pleasing symmetry. He's not an artist, not like--  
\--but he made it work anyway.

She pulls her acid-green ponytail over her shoulder and looks at the paper. "This is fine. You know where you want it?"

"I had a few thoughts," he says.

*

What he doesn't remember could fill a library. What he does could fill a book--several, in fact.

By this point, he has written five notebooks and is working on the sixth. Once he's done with them, he hides the notebooks where no one else could ever find them. He's good at hiding things. Now he's trying to get better at digging them up.

The paper isn't the point, though it helps to look back on them when he's having bad days (bad days; terrible days; vortices of days where uncertain memories try to pull him under); the act of writing down what he remembers is the point, putting all the horror into words--and the good times too, the few that he remembers. It's important to write that down too. To remember.

Not all of the memories are easy, but the helicarriers are. He can pull that day out to look at it any time he likes. He remembers the static of his mind, his sole focus the mission, killing the man in front of him. ( _Rogers, Steven Grant, Captain in the US Army--target_.)

But Rogers took his helmet off, let it fall. Dropped the shield into the Potomac. Spoke. ( _You've known me your whole life. You're my friend. James Buchanan Barnes. To the end of the line._ )

He had been the Asset, a machine made for destruction, but the words set off a chain of associations, ricocheting around his head, the echoes building up while the helicarrier shredded to pieces around them. He'd been so angry and afraid of the echoes, but when Rogers fell, he hadn't had to stop to think--he'd dived in after him and pulled him to shore, called 911.

And then he'd run, to try to figure out why he'd done it.

That had been the first notebook: trying to figure out who he was, who Rogers, Steven Grant, was to him. How he had broken through everything they'd done to him.

The first thing he'd been certain of was that Rogers ( _Steve_ ) was important to him. The second was that he didn't want to go back to the bank vault and report. Only after those two certainties did he stop to think that he was someone who could want. Someone who could choose.

But he'd needed more information.

He went to the Smithsonian, to the exhibit about Rogers, only to find it was in part an exhibit about him as well. Rogers hadn't lied. ( _Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield..._ ) But Rogers ( _Steve_ ) had called him Bucky. He had gotten the first notebook that day and copied down the information from the museum. There was so much, but it was incomplete. Impersonal.

The helicarrier, the museum: those days he remembers whenever he likes. Earlier days are more of a challenge. He would think that, once remembered, events would be he to recall at his leisure--didn't it work that way once?--but it doesn't, not always. But some things come easier the more he thinks about them. He can remember Rogers before the serum. The muscle memory came before the memory of any specific event: the curve of his own arm over Steve's skinny shoulders, his hand closing on the narrow band of muscle between clavicle and scapula.

He has so many names. James Buchanan Barnes rests uneasily on him, someone else's names, ones he hasn't learned. The Asset, the Winter Soldier; those are labels, not names, and not who he wants to be.

He's not sure who he wants to be.

Rogers wants him to be Bucky, his Bucky. His buddy, his pal. He knows that without even having to talk to him again--Rogers already told him. And he remembers, at least a little, who they were to each other. Steve isn't going to give up, not after jumping out of a plane without a parachute and single-handedly dragging him and what was left of the 107th out of Azzano. Not after dropping his shield and letting him beat the shit out of him on the helicarrier. He knows without having to ask that if he came to Rogers, Rogers would burn down the world to keep him safe. Or just to keep him.

He doesn't think he deserves that kind of single-minded intensity. That devotion. He's not saying the world shouldn't burn; just that Rogers ( _Steve_ ) shouldn't be the one to do it. Not for him.

The second notebook is for things he remembers doing; missions Hydra sent him on. Deaths--so many deaths. Decades of them. He is wading in blood with every footstep. Collateral deaths, collateral damage. And the things they had done to him, to make him their killer. The torture, the memory wipes.

And then other memories. He'd been a killer before, for the US Army, when he'd been with Rogers--with Captain America--and the Howling Commandos. His first steps of blood had begun there, doing for Steve what Captain America couldn't do: the shots from afar, the knives in the dark. Whatever it took to keep him clean; he remembers that much.

He still wants to keep him clean, keep the stain of himself off Steve.

*

He's been travelling from place to place, revisiting memories, staying low to the ground, where Steve can't find him. If he runs far enough, fast enough, would Steve just let him go? He could fade away, become a ghost in truth; a frightening story, but only a story. He knows it would hurt Steve, but he thinks maybe it would hurt him less than having to confront what he's become. Not his Bucky anymore, but this Frankenstein's monster of sewn-together scraps of memories and murderous impulses.

This is a foolish wish. Steve is not the only one looking for him. Hydra wants their creation back. So he runs, making himself as much a ghost as the living can be.

He doesn't think he's spent much time in the southern US. Rogers won't look for him here, and there are no memories lurking around Atlanta's skyscrapers. He makes his way through the sprawl until the buildings are shorter, neighborhoods connected by highways and surface roads. There's a house for sale, uninhabited, and he secures the basement, unloads the cash and supplies he stole in DC, and sets himself to digging through the mess Hydra's made of his brain.

The thing about remembering is that ninety percent of it is a horrorshow: his hands, coated in blood, the whining buzz-saw noise of his brain in the memories, the faces, seen up close or through a rifle scope.

But ten percent of it is good. Most of that ten percent is Steve.

He misses Steve. In a perfect world, he'd show up where Steve was, and Steve would greet him with open arms. In his imagination, he's walked into those arms a thousand times. It's easy to conjure the feel of it. He does remember Brooklyn, when casual touch was easy, arms slung around each other half the time, legs entwined on their ratty sofa, asleep curled around each other in the winter to stay warm. He remembers campsites all over Europe, shoulders nudging each other as they ate, Steve's warmth a bright spot even when the ground was hard and cold and he was hungry all the time, even after Azzano, the first stop on his unending journey of torment.

It would be different now. He's different, marked by everything that he's done, that's been done to him. His body is a landscape of scars. Not just the metal arm (though let's be clear; that's the capital city on the map of his hurts, marked with a big red star and everything), but the traces where bullets have passed through him, knives, faint lightning-marks from the electric current sent through him, a series of circles like meteor-strikes down his flesh arm, where some of his handlers had found amusement in burning him with cigarettes.

He looks down at the wreck of himself sometimes and has to sink his teeth into the meat of his right hand to bring himself back to his body, the despair that swamps him is so overwhelming. If he came back to Steve now, like this, Steve would know without him saying anything how badly he's been degraded, how little there is of the boy who so easily gripped his friend's neck, who kept so much ugliness from him. He's not strong anymore, only deadly. The strength has been drained away, drop by drop, with the blood he's spilled. Now he's just a thing that survives, and what good is he to Steve this way?

He has survived so much. Not unscathed--he is broken--but: he is here.

He's not sure he could survive if Steve looked at him like this and turned away.

He wishes he had that smooth, unscarred body back. Not because it matters what it looks like, really, but because it would mean he had never done those things, had those things done to him.

*

The tattoo parlor isn't far from the farmers' market where he buys produce most days. He noticed it walking back one day, and the thought of it tastes like fresh plums from the fruit stall.

He walks by it for days, thinking. The people coming in and out of the tattoo parlor cover a range of ages. Some do not have much visible ink. Some are covered in it. Some of the artwork is beautiful and some is ugly, but each of these people chose it.

He has a red star on the shoulder of his metal arm, but he didn't choose it. He didn't choose any of his scars.

*

He has been using a false name, both as a cover and to avoid thinking about what name he would want to use. But he can want this; he can choose a name. He could adopt his temporary name forever, or he could keep cycling through names, a constant metamorphosis. He doesn't have to be any one thing. He opens his first notebook, flips back to the pages he's annotated over and over again.

_James Buchanan Barnes._

_Bucky._

_Sergeant, US Army. 32557038_

If he chooses that name, what does that make him? He's not that person. That person is lost, even if he someday remembers every moment of his life. The decades of non-choice, of being a weapon, have set their scars beneath the skin too. If he becomes James Buchanan Barnes, is he trying to put on shoes that no longer fit?

That man was young. That man knew what it was to love and be loved.

If he becomes Bucky, what does that make him to Steve? Besides a ghost, a memory, the ripping off of a scab that had only just started to knit over.

_Too late to stuff back that genie, pal._

He picks up the pen and doodles. Numbers, letters. Lines, circles.

In the meat of his forearm, nearly in the crook of his elbow, is a silvery line. Knife wound. Kiev, 1961. He'd wanted to let the bodyguard win. What good was it being the world's best goddamned sniper if they made you murder little girls with knives? It was one of the first times he'd let an opponent through his guard. He couldn't not fight, but he didn't have to fight as well as he could. He'd wanted the bodyguard to stop him. Too bad it hadn't happened that way.

He rubs his metal fingers over the scar, resting his pen against the page.

What does it make him, if he chooses that?

*

"I thought, maybe on my forearm. Over the scar."

The tattoo artist, Ana, looks at the drawing, then back at his arm. "Covering the scar?"

"No, I know the shape's not right for that. Just--over the scar." The scar is a straight line, but the thought of a straight line of identifying numbers on his arm sent a full-body wave of revulsion through him, so deep he couldn't even sketch it out once.

His design is a circle, three letters like a monogram, the numbers barely visible, split up at the very bottom of every letter: 32 in the J, 557 and 038 in the Bs.  
It's his name. He's choosing it. And he's putting it where he can look at it any time, just shove his sleeve up and see the evidence of his choosing.

"You ready?" the artist asks. She pulls on disposable gloves, sets out her black ink. Her tattoos are colorful, but he thinks black ink will make the letters look solid and real against his pale scar. She takes a safety razor and clears away what little hair has grown over the scar.

"I'm ready," he says.

He braces himself against the whine of the tattoo needles. The sound is not different enough from the bone saws of his memory, and sweat pops out against the small of his back. Compared to fighting off the associations the sound makes in his mind, the actual pain of the needles is negligible, a minor stinging.

Finally, she wipes away the blood and ink. The lines are crisp and black and the scar is only a pleasing background to the letters, texture where the art wraps over the keloid. She gives him ointment and tells him how to care for it once he takes the bandage off.

"So you like it?" Ana asks as he pays the bill.

"It's perfect. Thank you," James Buchanan Barnes answers.


	2. A Star and Its Shadow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes just wants to consider his ink; Hydra has other ideas.

The tattoo heals quickly. Barnes has plenty of ointment left over when the skin is no longer red and the lines of the tattoo lie flat. He touches them gently with his metal fingers; there are pressure sensors all over the fingertips and he has fine motor control, but he worries about marring the lines regardless. 

Barnes--he is not ready to call himself James yet, and there is only one person he wants to call him Bucky--thinks that next time, he'll get ink in a place he can touch with his flesh hand. 

He thinks about Steve. 

There are memories he is sure of, memories that are certain. Most of these involve Steve. Steve when he was little; when they were both little, but Steve was smaller. Steve was always fragile, always precious, a flame that burned brighter because it was almost certain to blow out. Barnes remembers watching Steve, turning to track him like a compass needle always swings north. Steve burned so bright, throwing himself into fights; it's not that he didn't consider the consequences--it's that he never, never let them stop him. 

And Barnes could never have stopped him from throwing himself against those walls, wouldn't have wanted to. What he could do was help him, keep the world from breaking him as best as he was able. 

Then Steve was big, and still throwing himself at walls, only this time the walls were Hydra and the whole damn German army. 

Barnes remembers pain. Not just physical pain, though there was plenty of that. After Azzano, he remembers despair, because he was turning into some kind of monster after what Zola did to him, and Steve didn't need him anymore. He'd been so afraid: that if Steve didn't need him, he couldn't possibly want him. Steve was huge, his body finally able to cash the checks he'd been writing all along, and nobody could have missed the way Carter looked at him, and--

Barnes had still stayed. He could have gone home. Medical discharge. But where was home if Steve was still in Europe, still fighting? 

Would it have been different if he'd told him? Confessed that what Zola had done to him had more aftereffects than the tendency to wake up sweating and whimpering (not screaming; even in his sleep he knew not to scream and give their location away)? He could have told Steve about the burning ache in his bones, the knife slice down his arm that healed in days, the cold pit inside of him as his focus narrowed to the scope, dropping enemy soldiers as easy as candlepin bowling in the alley behind their apartment in Brooklyn. He hadn't felt much more than he had knocking over the pins.

But he'd been afraid: Of Steve's reaction. Of his own nightmares that he was turning into Steve's dark reflection. Adonis's shadow, made of monsters. 

And hey. That had come true.  

He remembers not wanting to go back to Brooklyn. It wouldn't have been home without Steve. So what does that make this place? 

He could find Steve. He tries to imagine going to him, talking to him. Right now, his life is simple. Hiding, remembering, writing it all down. As soon as he goes to Steve, things get complicated.

The only thing he wants more than to go to Steve is to _not_ go to him. Because if Steve looks on him and sees the monster he sees, then what is left for him? 

* 

Atlanta is big, spread out. The little part he's holing up in looks like nothing more than a series of strip malls. The tattoo parlor is next to a vape shop and a thrift store. The sign in the window is painted to look like old-fashioned tattoo script and there are pieces of art ("flash," Ana called them) in the window. He rolls his shoulders back and goes in. 

The place just opened--it's early afternoon, and there's no one at the desk as he pushes in the door. The jangle of the bell calls Ana from the back. 

"Back for more?" She smiles at him. Smiling seems so easy for everyone else. 

He hands her another sheet from his notebook.

This one is simpler than the last: a bright white star, with a shadow streaming out behind it, blood red edging into black. 

"Should be easy enough," Ana says, frowning at the paper. "Where do you want this one?"

He rolls up his jeans to show her a scar on his calf where he ran through some razor wire during an extraction, just high enough that his boots hadn't been able to protect him. It'd ripped right through his combat trousers into the flesh beneath. She frowns at the scar, but doesn't comment, only takes his drawing away to make the transfer paper. 

This time he knows what to expect: the disinfectant, the razor, the buzz of the needles. Ana's frown of concentration. The pain... He has had more opportunity than most to become a connoisseur of pain. This pain is bright, shallow. This pain will end in beauty. 

The outline is done, and Ana switches over to white ink. "This one have some meaning to you?" 

He can feel his face frowning without his meaning to; not anger, just thoughtfulness. He knows exactly what the tattoo means, but how could he explain it to someone who doesn't know Steve, doesn't know him? A shiver rolls through him at the thought that Steve is the only other person on this earth who could possibly understand what he means by it. 

Ana immediately lifts the needle. "Are you okay? Do you need to take a break?"

"I'm fine," he says. "Just thinking." He leans over, looks at his calf. She wipes ink and blood away so he can see the white star, only half finished. 

She nods and bends back over the tattoo. "I like the design." 

"It's light and its opposite. The good, and the bad behind it." He feels a little goofy when he says it, overly earnest, but she just nods. 

"It's simple, but simple's good. Simple can be compelling." He glances at her sleeved arms, the intricate designs. She catches his gaze and laughs. "Complicated's good too." 

Maybe it would be. He smiles at her and leans back, watching the needle move.

*  


No one should be looking for him in Atlanta, but a day later, someone's following him. He ducks down a couple of streets at random, but whoever it is keeps on him. He turns again, new tattoo stinging pleasantly at his calf, heart stuttering a little faster. He's hasn't had to fight anyone in  _weeks_. He doesn't want to kill anyone else. He's tired of it. He wants to write in his notebooks some more, draw some more tattoos, get Ana to put them on him when he's decided which scar to improve next. 

Doesn't seem like that's in the cards, though. 

He turns down a side street next to a parking deck. Footsteps follow him. He checks a couple of knives, makes sure he can get to them easily. There' s a gun strapped to the small of his back, but guns are loud, and he doesn't want the attention. 

From behind him, a woman's voice growls in Russian: "Longing." A pit opens up in his stomach and his muscles slow, preparing to comply. A voice in his head, small and frightened, screeches  _nononononono_ \--

He whirls and throws the knife at the source of the voice, but--low. Even now, he doesn't want to kill her.

She's alone, a tall woman in heels and a suit, carrying a gym bag over her shoulder. Her mouth drops open and a thin, keening noise comes out of it, doubtless because of the three-inch knife hanging out of her thigh, right above her knee. Or perhaps it's related to the fact that the first word of the sequence didn't completely paralyze him. Her mistake, not talking faster.  

He strides up next to her, twists her left arm behind her back and marches her into the shadow of a building, pushing her down the wall until she's seated. He squats next to her, still holding her left wrist. 

"How did you find me?" he growls.

"R-rusted," she gasps, in Russian. 

Trigger words don't work if you stutter 'em, lady.

He twists the knife in her leg, and she sobs. "Don't try that again. How did you find me?" 

"A kid spotted your arm, called in a tip. Cops didn't think it was legit, but I started looking anyway." She sucks in a shuddering breath. "Just my l-luck I found you." 

Damn it. He's been careful, hiding his arm, wearing gloves. But after DC, his face--his arm--are probably plastered all over the news. He has to think about this. What if Ana had recognized him? 

She's wearing a scarf. Barnes removes it and wads it into her mouth in case she tries to trigger him again. Her eyes are bright with tears, watching him fearfully. She should be afraid. The Winter Soldier would have killed her already. 

She doesn't know how lucky she is, not just because he's tired of killing. The only thing she fears is pain, death, secure in the knowledge that her mind is her own. She doesn't know how much worse it can get. His heart is leaping like a jackrabbit, just as ready to bolt away from predators. So close. If she had started from further away, if she had gotten the trigger sequence out...

But she didn't. 

He pulls the gym bag off her shoulder and unzips it. It's not workout clothes. How nice it would have been to be surprised. She has rolls of cash, restraints, a burner phone, a Glock, a folder full of documents, including train tickets to DC ( _no, thank you_ ), a metal disc of unknown purpose, and a thumb drive. He pulls out the restraints and secures her, wrists and ankles.

She moans behind the makeshift gag. He meets her eyes. She looks away. 

Barnes pulls the knife out of her thigh. It's bleeding pretty dramatically. Hope he didn't sever anything too vital, but she's not dead, so he's awarding himself points for that. He wipes it and sheathes it; he'll wait to clean it more thoroughly until he gets back to the basement and erases any trace he was ever there.

He shoulders the gym bag, dials 911, and tosses the burner phone onto her lap. She tries to say something through her scarf, but he ignores it. 

It's time to leave Atlanta.


	3. Tags

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes goes to London, memories bubble up, he gets another tattoo.

It's nearly Christmas by the time Barnes gets to Fort Lauderdale. He doesn't remember ever having been this far south in the continental US. It's warm enough--in the high seventies--that he sweats a little in his long-sleeved shirt and jacket. 

It's probably snowing in New York. Is Steve cold?

The ship will take two weeks to get from Fort Lauderdale to Southampton. It's slow, but he's in no rush. Flying would be faster, but there's no way he's going through a metal detector or risking being spotted as part of whatever terrorist watchlist he's on. Security is a lot laxer on a cruise line. 

He doesn't have much luggage. The cash, thumb drive, and folder from the Hydra goon, he kept, but the rest of it, he ditched immediately. He thinks the metal disc was meant to short out his arm. The Glock would have been useful, but too risky to transport overseas. (His knives are in his checked bag. If he needs a gun, he is confident he can acquire one, but unless he runs into more Hydra assholes, he's confident he can handle most civilians with knives, or just his fists. Even if he didn't have one instant-concussion fist.) He ditched the gym bag in case there was a tracker embedded in it somewhere, but the folder had plenty of interesting information. Hydra bases, possible chains of command now that Steve and the Black Widow had put all of Hydra's intimate details online. A side project for if he gets tired of sketching tattoos. 

His notebooks are in his backpack. He retrieved the ones he hid, and there's a bit of a thrill in having them all together. If anybody looked at all of them right now, they'd have a front-row seat to his brain. Good luck making sense out of it. 

Barnes gets stopped at the metal detector boarding the ship, but he expected that. He cut his hair in the hotel room last night. He wanted to cut it military short--along with the clothes he bought at an army surplus store, it would be a reasonable cover--but he was unable to hold the buzzing clippers close to his head. When he stopped shaking and sweating and breathing hard, he took a pair of scissors to it. Muscle memory took over, and when he looked in the mirror, it was a decent haircut. He had clearly done this before. It's not the buzz cut he had in mind, but he holds his left arm rigid at his side and mutters, "Afghanistan," when the woman behind the scanner asks about the prosthetic. She waves him on with sympathetic eyes after running the metal detector over him, and he tries to ignore the feeling that he's taken advantage of her. That's the whole damn point of all the spy shit, taking advantage of people. 

But once he's on, all he has to do it sit in his room and dig around in his cottage-cheese brain. Writing, eating, sleeping--that's entirety of what he pencils into his schedule. The hum of the engines helps him sleep, as it turns out. He expected the mechanical sound to cause mental static, but it's not like any machine Hydra ever used on him. It's soothing.

He writes out memories, the good and the bad. His memories of London are excruciating. There's nothing in them to compare to the torture he remembers from various Hydra handlers, but in retrospect, Bucky Barnes in London was a mess: afraid of what he was becoming, unsure of what he was to Steve now that Steve was Captain America, plenty rugged and with Agent Carter looking at him like she saw what Bucky had always seen in him. Barnes can't say he's any smarter; part of him wants to go find Steve, and fuck the consequences. 

But he can't go to him like this. Memories sloughing off him like dead skin, scars mapping every goddamn weak spot seventy years of shit have left on him. Maybe Steve hasn't needed him since 1943, but if he comes to him like  _this_ , it'll be obvious how useless he is. His pen stutters to a stop over the page, traces a circle, fills it in. 

Maybe if he writes enough, excises the memories, pins them down on paper, he can go to Steve. Maybe if he writes long enough, Bucky will come back to him. 

Not all the memories were awful. There was one night while they were stationed in London. In the field, he and Steve slept next to each other more often than not--it was cold, and Steve was warm, and it wasn't so different from cold nights in Brooklyn, or hot nights on the fire escape or the roof, when it was too stuffy in their apartment. At the barracks in London, though, Steve was quartered with the officers, and Bucky with the men. 

They'd had a few days of leave, and he could have gotten a hotel, but he'd found an empty room in the barracks and waited for the nightmares. He didn't scream, even though there weren't any Germans to overhear. But Steve had known. Why wouldn't he? He'd seen it often enough while they camped. Steve had found him, even though he surely had better things to do. He'd come into the room where Bucky was gasping, cold in his own sweat, shaking. There was hardly any light--London was under blackout--but Steve's undershirt had glowed white to Bucky's eye, sharper than he could ever have seen before Azzano. Steve hadn't said a word, just climbed into the narrow bed with him and wrapped his giant body around him, holding him until he stopped shaking. He tucked Bucky's head under his chin, his arms solid and more real than dreams of the needles. 

Bucky had stared at Steve's dog tags for what felt like hours, while his breathing slowed down to match Steve's, though his pulse never quite did. He had fallen asleep curled into Steve, and when he woke up in the morning, Steve was already gone. 

So maybe Steve had known a little of what he hadn't told him. 

*

The ship has numerous restaurants and shops and bars. It's all a little ridiculous. He remembers a little about sailing to Europe from New York in the forties; mostly impressions of men crammed together in tiny iron rooms, terrible food, the scent of cigarette smoke and wet socks, endless scrubbing. 

This ship is a hotel on the water. He has a room to himself. It's not big compared to the basement in Atlanta, but compared to the barrack room he shared with seven other soldiers on the way to London in 1942, it's a goddamned palace. And he can buy beer and a sandwich or sake and sushi any time he likes. He can buy more clothes if he wants, or duty-free chocolate or cigarettes or booze. He picks out a couple of shirts and a pair of jeans. Dark colors, nothing flashy. 

On impulse, he grabs a pack of Lucky Strikes and a lighter at the register and retreats to the top deck with his purchases. The deck smells of spilled booze and ashtrays. He doesn't really remember smoking; it was enough of a background activity that it's more of a muscle memory than an isolated moment in time. But when he lights up, the smell goes straight to the back of his brain and he remembers hunching over a cigarette on the fire escape outside Steve's window, blowing the smoke away into the night where it wouldn't bother Steve's lungs. Steve had been real sick that summer, he remembers suddenly, sick enough Bucky's ma had told him he might not make it. 

Barnes had been over at Steve's place all the time anyway, but after that, he made sure he didn't miss a day. Mrs. Rogers had been happy to see him; happy that Steve had someone to keep him company while she had to work. He'd come after work at the grocer's, lifting boxes all day, and it killed Steve that he couldn't come work there too. But his bum lungs had kept him flat on his back, and Bucky on the fire escape. And when he was done smoking, he'd come inside and read to Steve, whatever dime novel he'd been into, or watch him sketch, try to make him laugh. And, Barnes suddenly remembers, when Steve fell asleep, worn out from his body's fight, he would stroke his hair back from his sweaty forehead and bargain with God, promising anything, anything, if only Steve wouldn't die. The  _ferocity_ with which he'd prayed strikes Barnes.

And Steve hadn't died. 

For a terrible, awful second Barnes wonders if everything that's happened to him since then if the price God asked for saving Steve, but he rejects the idea almost immediately. 

Besides, Bucky would have said it was worth it. His brain might be full of holes, but he remembers Bucky's fervor, and he  _knows_.  

Barnes takes another drag on the cigarette, letting the smoke scratch his throat, fill his lungs. Maybe there are more memories hiding in the holes in his brain, just waiting for some sensory detail to anchor onto. He hopes so. 

*

Barnes is pretty sure he's never been to Southampton before. Not that he'd necessarily remember, but he doesn't feel any ghosts lurking by the port or in the stone buildings. It's nice, and the internet tells him there are lots of interesting museums, but London is only seventy miles away, and it pulls him like a magnet. He was there with Steve, and even if he mostly remembers fragments of misery, the urge to prod at those memories is like the urge to prod a sore tooth with his tongue, or pick at a scab. 

The train from Southampton to London is only an hour and a half. He has to remind himself of that several times as he sweats and shakes in his seat. It is bearable, but not pleasant. 

Waterloo Station is huge and full of people, but it is such a relief to be off the train that he almost doesn't care. He has six knives concealed about his person, and that knowledge is a comfort as he is jostled by the crowd. He clutches his duffel close and shuffles off to a newsstand to buy a cup of tea and a moment's space while he decides what to do next. He doesn't have a destination or a plan, not really. He has a folder full of information on Hydra and a thumb drive he hasn't looked at yet--getting a computer is definitely on the list of things he needs to do--but he knows that he's not going to worry about any of that until he's gone back to places he's been before. He knows it's going to hurt. That's the thing about pulling off scabs; there's always blood.

*

He remembers drinking with Steve and meeting Carter in a bar in a hotel. The building's still there, though the bar is gone. It's a restaurant now, but there's a room with a bar and he orders a whisky, neat, without thinking too hard about it. When the bartender passes him his drink, he prepares to discover whether or not he likes it. Whisky tastes like smoke and burns as it goes down. He likes it. 

He leans against the bar and scans the room, left hand firmly in his pocket, right hand curled around his glass. He lets his eyes unfocus for a second and he can almost see the bar as it was. He'd been drinking whisky then, too, trying to hide what a mess he was from Steve. Tenderness briefly unfurls in him for the younger self he only sees in fragments: hurting and frightened, but trying to soldier on. Not entirely different from his current self. 

Barnes finishes his whisky and pays, then wanders off. Nothing sparks memories. The streets look too different. Every now and then he gets a flash of the bones underneath pushing through the modern storefronts and advertisements, but not enough to bring anything else floating to the top. He stops to buy a phone, then uses it to map out places he visited in 1943. The Cabinet War Rooms are open to the public now, and he visits, but all he gets  is an image of maps and charts, nothing about Steve. Steve is what he wants to remember. The other memories, the later memories of what they made him, what he did: he doesn't actually want to remember those. The thought makes him feel shaky like riding on the train. But he has to do it. He can't yet articulate why he does it, but there's a certainty in his bones, as solid as Steve's arms, that it is something he has to confront.

He ends up at a hotel near Bethnal Green. There are several tattoo parlors within a couple of blocks. He is unreasonably entertained by the names of two: either Cloak and Dagger or Vagabond seems on-the-nose appropriate to his situation. He already knows what he wants next.

He asks for a woman to be his artist at Vagabond. Nobody so much as raises an eyebrow at the request. He doesn't remember ever having a female handler, and he is afraid of how he might react to the buzzing of the machine if a man wields it.

This woman is not as talkative as Ana, but her hands are sure as she begins the now-familiar ritual. She takes his drawing without comment and suggests a few modifications, all of which he approves. He already knows he's no more than an adequate artist, and her execution improves his idea. He wore a button-down shirt in preparation, and once he has it unbuttoned, he's careful that nothing he does exposes where his metal arm joins to his shoulder. He holds it still, like he did on the boat. As she's smoothing the transfer-paper design to his chest, over the shallow line of a knife that made it through his tactical vest, over his heart, she asks, "Veteran?" 

He nods. She doesn't ask anything else, just gets her needles ready. He leans back and relaxes into the pain. This tattoo isn't big--two small not-quite-rectangles, two inches by one-and-one-eighth inches, in black and gray and white. The writing is the fiddliest part. He didn't reproduce them as well as he could have after staring at them all night: just a name, a number, and a place of origin: Brooklyn.

"These your tags?" she asks, as she's finishing up. 

"No." He cranes his neck to look down on them as she wraps the tattoo in ointment plastic. "They belonged to a friend I lost." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vagabond and Cloak and Dagger are both actual tattoo shops. I had a difficult time resisting their thematically-appropriate names.


	4. (Message in a Bottle)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life can't be all tattoos and nervous breakdowns. Barnes takes on Hydra and reaches out to Steve.

Between the paper file and the thumb drive and the laptop he bought in London, Barnes has a lot more intel than he did before. 

None of it is pleasant. 

Lists of Hydra bases all over Europe, some in the US, South America. Africa. Asia. Everywhere except the Antarctic, really. It makes him tired to look at, and then  _angry_. So many heads cut off, and yet so many remain. 

But the communiqués make it clear that Hydra is in a state of disarray. Project Insight was their biggest play yet, and when it went down ( _good job, Steve, well done_ ), the Asset was not the only one left leaderless and confused. Of course, he's feeling a lot better now, so they might be as well. Time to hit them hard, before they have too much time to regroup. 

Some of the photos in the files leave unpleasant reverberations in his thoughts. Going there might lead to further mental disarray.  He practices, as much as he can, looking at the images that bring him discomfort, trying to bring up the memories associated with them, no matter how much he might wish to leave them submerged. This work leaves him sweating and sometimes makes him reject the nutrition he knows his body needs to be ready for action. He swallows down protein bars and shakes with grim determination to reach his ideal caloric load. 

He can't be everywhere at once. The bases in the Americas he is unprepared to deal with at the moment, but he makes a plan for Europe. His hands remember things before his brain does: securing the laptop and the phone, hacking into closed-circuit cameras around the warehouse in Newcastle, writing up reports of what he has learned, what he has planned, in coded shorthand.

He watches the warehouse. What he'd give for a couple of bugs planted on the inside. As it is, he watches the coming and goings of workers, on foot and in unmarked trucks. There's a loading bay. They are moving something. Weapons? People? He can't be sure. Going in so blind is foolish, and yet...The phrase "the banality of evil" keeps floating into his head. He can't remember where he heard it, but it won't leave him. This looks like any old warehouse. These could be any workers. But they are cousins to the ones who stole his autonomy. Hell, some of them might be the same people. It sets a fire in his gut that burns away caution. 

He has eight knives. He does not, as of yet, have a gun, but he's going to.  

Barnes does a little looking around for the bad parts of town, then waits until night to ghost into them. He doesn't find what he's looking for until the third night, when he dresses a little nicer, a thick peacoat thrown over a dress shirt and slacks, and heads down an alley he scoped out the previous nights. He wanders until footsteps shadow his, echoing off the sides of the buildings around him. The streetlights are far away. It is dark, and there is a gap of some nine meters between closed-circuit cameras. He stops in the gap, lifts his hands, and turns around.

There are four young men in tracksuits, hands in puffy coats and leather jackets. It will be annoying if they are only armed with knives.  

"Your wallet, brother," one man says in a thick Geordie accent. 

Barnes lowers his hands just a little. "No, I don't think so." 

There's the welcome--and completely unnecessary--sound of a gun cocking.  Don't actually need to do it anymore, but these idiots think it sounds menacing. Probably hoping to get out of this without actually shooting him; well, that's going to happen, but probably not the way they think. The third guy from the left has the gun in his pocket. Barnes lunges forward, twists his wrists, and relieves him of his weapon. The man next to him draws another gun, so Barnes takes that one too. Thanks, guy. Now he has two guns and they have zero. It's a pretty basic math problem, but he likes the solution.

The other two have drawn knives, but are holding them loosely, aware that the balance of this encounter has shifted in an unexpected way. Barnes smiles at them and jams the guns in his pockets. "Do you have extra ammunition?" he asks. 

They look at each other, eyes rolling, irises ringed with white. "No," one stammers out. 

Barnes smiles at them again, broader. One makes an abortive movement with his knife, but the other three assess Barnes, perhaps remember that he has their guns now, and retreat. Barnes rolls his shoulders and walks on. 

*  
He doesn't have tactical gear. He doesn't have armor. He doesn't have much in the way of intel. He doesn't have backup. 

He also doesn't have much patience, after days of reviewing the Hydra goons' movements.

He has two guns with twenty-three rounds between them. He has eight knives. He has a burner phone and several thumb drives. He has an internal sense of rage that is probably making him more careless than he ought to be. It was not something the Asset ever had to deal with; the Asset had a chorus of screeching brain weasels and a constant state of fear of his handlers to motivate him, but he could never afford to be  _angry_ about it. Barnes is aware of his own fear as well, so much dimmer than the anger: he does not want them to control him again. He would rather die. 

Barnes runs his metal hand over the file in front of him. The only problem with that is that if he does, who's going to deal with these assholes? 

A brief memory flashes through him, earnest blue eyes bent over a map, Bucky moving markers and Steve nodding intently as they figured out a plan of attack. 

All right; if it comes down to it, he knows who has his back. 

He's already taken photos of the paper documents and added them to the thumb drive. He sorts them into separate files by continent, encrypts them, and braces himself. His hand shakes on the keyboard, and he'd love to pretend he doesn't know why. This is not Steve looking for him. This is him reaching out to Steve. That is far more nerve-wracking than taking on a Hydra base by himself. 

He attaches the North and South American files to an email from a dummy account, saves the draft. Steve and his friends ought to take care of their stomping grounds. That'll leave him free to clean up over here.  

The rest of the files he attaches to a message to be sent a week from now from a different account, if he does nothing else. So if he dies in Newcastle, or wherever he's going next, Steve will have the knowledge to scrub these bastards off the face of the earth. 

Steve has a publicly searchable email address (captain@stark.net). Does he even check it? Who knows. But he also has an unlisted cell phone number, and Barnes feels confident that Steve will see a text. He spends far more time than is reasonable agonizing over what to say. In the end, all he writes in the body of the email is  _In case you run out of things to do_. 

The text is also difficult to compose. He sends it from a randomized site at a public café, not from his phone. He includes the dummy account's email--a string of numbers--and the message  _Busy cutting off heads._   _Got something for you. Check your email._ Steve might not know it's from him, but he won't ignore the message, either--Barnes is confident in Steve's sense of responsibility. 

He's done what he can within the confines of the information he has. It's time to strike.

*

Over the cameras, the traffic in and out of the warehouse doesn't seem altered from previous days of observation. It is Barnes who is altered. The anger is still there, but a cold, assessing calm grips him, has him calculating lines of attack, zones without camera coverage. He has done what he can, and now it's time to act. 

He dresses in black and hides his guns and knives. He wishes he had his tactical vest, but he'll just have to be careful not to get shot anywhere vital. He stops, just for a moment, as he is pulling the black shirt over his head, and looks at his forearm, his initials inked over the scar, a reminder of who he is, and the tags over his heart: a reminder of who he was, what he's lost. Who he hopes to be. 

Once the sun goes down, it's time to move. He walks through the streets, just another guy in a coat, watch cap pulled down around his ears. His route is circuitous, but it avoids cameras, so it's well worth the extra time. Anticipation drums a staccato beat against his pulse points. The worries about Steve, about his memories, the perpetual low-level hum of self-loathing ( _all the things he's done_ ) all fall away. This is what he was made for, this violence. If they didn't want it turned against them, they shouldn't have made him. 

He slides into the loading dock, one more shadow in a night full of them. It's quiet this time of night, but there's a guy enjoying a cigarette by a door. Probably the last thing you'll enjoy tonight, fella, so take a moment to savor it.

Barnes lets him take a deep drag, then sidles up silently behind him and clocks him a good one with the metal fist. The guy staggers and pitches forward. Barnes catches him and stubs out the fallen cigarette butt with his boot heel. He slides the man's finger over the door lock, braces the door open, then zip ties the guy's wrists to the parking bollard by the loading dock. A quick pat down reveals no weapons besides a truncheon, which Barnes has no interest in. He lets him fall to the oil-stained concrete, then slips into the facility. 

Once he's past the loading bay, and a moment of wondering grimly what exactly it is they get delivered, the place looks more like an office building than a warehouse. Long hallways, florescent lighting, fucking  _cubicles_ with coffee mugs next to computers and framed pictures of family members. Yeah, World's #1 Dad, whose #1 goal is mindfucking all of humanity into perfect obedience, and oh  _there's_ that column of rage again, but he's using it now, letting it fire him. Instinct--or memories and half-memories of other Hydra bases he's known--tells him that the important stuff will be down, so he finds the staircase. He's had a lot of practice at moving silently in combat boots, so the guards on the lowest level are completely surprised when he bursts out of the stairwell. 

He slings his metal arm into the first one, who collapses like a sack of sand, and the second one pulls a taser, moving so, so slowly. Barnes whips around, letting the taser contacts ping harmlessly off his metal arm. 

"Shit," whispers the guard before Barnes grabs his face and pinches his mouth shut. The guard's own jacket makes an adequate gag while Barnes secures him with zip ties and checks him and his unconscious companion for weapons. This is more like it--both have guns and additional ammunition, all of which Barnes is pleased to add to his personal arsenal. As the Asset, his weapons had weapons, and more guns make him feel more secure. The guns click against the burner phone in his pocket.

"Where are they?" he mutters to the guard. The man whimpers around the cloth in his mouth. Barnes jams his own gun into the pulse point on the man's throat, looks in his eyes to make sure the need for quiet is understood. Then he pulls the gag down. 

"Where's what?" the man whispers.

"The hidden rooms." Barnes pokes the gun into the guy's carotid artery for emphasis. "The labs or whatever." 

"I can't--" 

Barnes grabs the man's jaw with his metal fingers and exerts a fraction of the pressure those fingers are capable of. The man squeaks. "I'm sure they've promised to do terrible things if you show anyone," he murmurs. 

"Y-yes." The guy's eyes roll up, to the side. 

"They're not here. I am."  Barnes smiles at him. He makes it as broad and genuine as his face is capable of.

"The elevator," the guy says. 

"Is there anyone else here?" 

"No. Just in the lab."

Barnes shoves his jacket back into his mouth. "Lead the way."

There's an elevator bank by the back of the offices, but the guard leads him past that to a service elevator. The emergency call button flips up to reveal a biometric scanner. Cute. The guy scans his eyeball, and the elevator descends. Hydra always did like basements. 

"Eye scan, huh." Barnes draws a knife and starts flipping it up and down. The guard frantically tries to talk and drools around his jacket. The words are too muffled to make out, but Barnes bets he has the gist. "Tell you what," he says. "I'm just gonna keep you for later." The man's hands are already tied behind his back and he secures his legs by pulling his pants down. He ties the man to a potted tree by the elevator and says, "Don't wander off."

There are more offices down here. Not cubicles, but big glassed-in rooms, lights dark for the night. There's a weapons room that Barnes promises himself he'll visit on his way out, and at the end of the hallway, the lab he's been expecting. Fucking Hydra. It's always labs with these people, always experiments. And never anything that might benefit the general populace. Imagine if half the scientific thought and resources that had been given to developing his own memory wipe and reconditioning equipment had been devoted to, say, a cure for cancer, or even the common cold. No, instead it's energy weapons and satellite arrays to punish thought crimes. 

There are three people in white lab coats, a man and two women. The skin of his back immediately attempts to grow goosebumps and walk up his spine, and sweat beads his upper lip. This is a terrible time for memories to resurface. If he knows that, why doesn't his brain? Look, there's no chair in this lab. They can't wipe him. A whole fuckton of other equipment--dubious chemicals titrating in a corner, computers with analyses pulled up. One of the women is leaned over a screen, while the other checks something on her phone. The man is getting what looks like a rack of samples out of a refrigerator. Spit floods his mouth, a wave of revulsion. He swallows hard. Samples from some poor lab rat like himself. God, he hopes there are no more like him. 

Time to crash the science party. There's another biometric scanner on the door to the lab, but Barnes isn't going back to get the guard guy, not when adrenaline and nausea are battling it out in his nervous system. He wants to hit something, and there's a big-ass window right here. 

Good things about the metal arm tonight: 1) quickly and efficiently renders Hydra goons unconscious (non-fatally is a bonus, though they will doubtless regret all the side effects of head trauma,) 2) deflects taser contacts, 3) intimidates guards more rapidly than a flesh arm, and 4) smashes glass without the need to wrap his fist. He knocks the glass shards out of the window and jumps through it while the scientists are still reacting to the sound of the crash. 

"It's the fucking Soldier," one of them gasps out, but by that time, he's already sent a throwing knife through the phone the woman was holding. She pulls her hand back and shakes it like it stings.

"Don't move if you want to live," he manages to say around the bile in his throat. The three of them freeze and stare at him like a dog just talked. It's a nice reminder that these are the same variety of asshole that Hydra's always been. He pats them all down and removes their phones. None of them have any weapons. 

"What exactly are you making here?" he asks when he is satisfied they don't pose  a physical threat. They trade glances and set their mouths stubbornly. 

"If you cut off one head--" the man begins. 

Barnes shakes his head. "It's like you think I never heard that before." He ponders them for a moment, then ties all of their left ankles together and to a heavy work desk. If they try anything, he'll kill them, but until they do, he'll leave them alive. He plans on turning them over to the authorities when he's done here, and while there are certainly things to be learned from corpses, living people are much more useful. He does hit all the computers and copy files to thumb drives, because he assumes as a matter of principle that just about every authority needs oversight. 

He's deeply, deeply tempted to destroy the samples and experiments in progress, but there could be biological or chemical hazards. No point not shooting these assholes if he's going to accidentally explode them. 

He gags them, binds their hands behind their backs, and makes them edge out of the lab like the world's clumsiest and evilest three (four?) legged race. It's the little pleasures, really. They and the guard get excited when they all see each other, and he keeps a gun trained on them while he empties out the weapons cache. 

This is more like it. There are guns, surveillance equipment, cash, body armor...grenades. Plastique. Flash bombs. Sedatives. His plans just got a lot more feasible. He loads up a couple of duffel bags. If he had more arms, he'd take it all, but alas, he's limited to what he can carry. He clinks gently as he walks back to his collection of goons. 

He guides them, shuffling, into the elevator, and once they reach the office floor, he finds a likely supply closet to lock them into, along with Eyeball Guard's unconscious friend. He scratches "Assholes" into the door with one of his knives, then snaps a picture of it with his burner phone. 

He retraces his steps through the facility. The loading dock guy is starting to come around, so Barnes tosses him in the back of one of the trucks and locks him in. Then he dials 999 on the burner phone. It's entertaining trying to explain what emergency services he needs. "Probably a counter-terrorism unit. Hazardous materials containment for sure," he says. "It's a Hydra base with a lab. Not sure what they were making." He explains in detail what they will find and where they will find it, drops his phone on the loading bay with the picture of the asshole closet open on the screen, then ignores all the nice lady's attempts to get his name and her requests that he stick around to answer questions.

He does stay, though--he hides himself and his duffel bags around the corner to watch until he sees lights and sirens. Once he's satisfied that they're taking it seriously, he glides off into the night, walking as casually as a man with two bags of explosives and weaponry can. Despite the weight, there's a spring in his step. 

This was a good night's work.   



	5. (The Song They Play)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes didn't expect Nice to be so beautiful. He's been here before--this Hydra base is one he remembers, at least a little. The memories are unpleasant. But he'd always been transported in covered trucks or moved in cryo. He'd never come in to the touristy part of town. It's pretty. The buildings are all sunrise-colored, pinks and golds and creams, and at night, the reflection of the lights sits on the water, shimmering like a dream; a beautiful dream, not the kind that he has.
> 
> He doesn't remember if he's ever been to the beach. Looking out at the blue, blue water and the white sand, he thinks he'd like to try it. 
> 
> Maybe someday, but not today. Today, he has things to do. 
> 
> Warning: Violence in this chapter! Also, Barnes remembers some unpleasant things Hydra did to him. Nothing too graphic, but proceed with caution.  
> 

Barnes didn't expect Nice to be so beautiful. He's been here before--this Hydra base is one he remembers, at least a little. The memories are unpleasant. But he'd always been transported in covered trucks or moved in cryo. He'd never come in to the touristy part of town. It's pretty. The buildings are all sunrise-colored, pinks and golds and creams, and at night, the reflection of the lights sits on the water, shimmering like a dream; a beautiful dream, not the kind that he has.

He doesn't remember if he's ever been to the beach. Looking out at the blue, blue water and the white sand, he thinks he'd like to try it. 

Maybe someday, but not today. Today, he has things to do. 

This is an inherently riskier mission than the one in Newcastle. This facility was meant to hold him--this facility  _has_  held him. This was one of the places where he was stored and remade. A shiver runs down his back. A place where he was punished. But then, that's the point of all this, isn't it? Not just revenge. Not just protecting the current self from his ugly past, but preventing anyone else from ever being reborn as he had been, weapon and monster and...he can't quite make himself say "victim," but he knows he never had a choice in the things he did or in all the things that were done to him.

He leaves the touristy parts of Nice and moves inward to  an area less reminiscent of sunrise and candy, factories and rows of shops and tall cement-block apartment buildings in shades of drab concrete. He finds a nondescript hotel not too far from the base (a factory this time, not a warehouse.) The hotel room doesn't have much to recommend it besides location--it has the musty smell of cigarettes from decades past and a faint _eau de mildew_ \--but it is so much better than other places he's slept, not even counting the cryotube. 

He has much, much more materiel this time around, courtesy of the assholes in Newcastle. He needs to do some basic surveillance of the base here, but he is confident that withing a few days, he'll be ready to pull this base to the ground.

*

There's a grotty café half a block from his hotel, and though the tables aren't exactly sparkling clean, the cheese and ham pastry that he purchases is flaky and buttery, and the coffee in a tiny cup is strong and bitter. The woman behind the counter takes his euros, and he eyes the band tattooed around her upper arm, though he doesn't ask her about it. He is pleased to discover that French is among the languages in which he is fluent.

It hadn't felt right to get a tattoo in Newcastle. He didn't want to voluntarily mark himself with anything to do with Hydra, not even to commemorate a victory over them. The scars they had left on him had enough real estate on his skin. Maybe one day he'd feel he'd taken a big enough bite of them that he could mark it voluntarily--but this was not the day, and he didn't think it would be anytime soon. The only things he'd put on his skin so far amounted to a declaration of who he was and a declaration of who he'd loved.

The thought took him aback, and he examined it. He knew he had loved Steve. That was...there was no other way to describe what he remembered of Bucky's feelings. Even now, what was left of him, this shell of memories and mostly murderous impulses wanted to curl up around Rogers.

He didn't remember whether Rogers had loved him back, but judging from the actions he--this consciousness--had witnessed, Rogers was ready to let the Soldier batter him to death rather than fight him again once he had accomplished his mission of taking down Project Insight. Even Barnes's perforated brain meat could draw a conclusion from that data set. 

Would it be so bad to see what happened if he went to Steve?

God, yes. The only thing he could do to Steve was drag him down to his level. No amount of killing Hydra assholes is going to wash those stains away. All he can do is try and keep the blot from spreading.

*

This base is more heavily guarded and fortified than the one in Newcastle. That's okay; he's more heavily armed too. The one thing he really worries about is the damn words; the lady in Atlanta started to trigger him to do--something. He doesn't know what, but he's sure he doesn't want to find out in the middle of hitting this place. In a way, that particular asshole did him a favor. Now he knows the words exist. Now he can defend against them. 

Time to go shopping. 

There's an electronics shop a couple of blocks away from the hotel, not far from cement apartment blocks that make him think "grim" and "cold" and summon up a little of the Asset's mental static. But the electronics store is run by a girl in a hijab who pops her gum and sells him an mp3 player and a set of earbuds. 

"I need some music on it," he tells her. 

She raises her eyebrow and pops her gum. "What kind of music do you like?" 

Memories: the piano playing in the bar in London, men in suits spinning women in dresses and red lipstick, horns playing, Steve with him, leaning back against a bar and drinking cold beer out of a cold glass. Newer songs: heavy on the drums and bass, electronic sounds, screeching guitar. He thinks again of the woman in Atlanta. 

"Loud," he says. 

The girl laughs at that. "If you've got music on your computer, you just plug it in and move the files," she says. 

The files on his computer are mostly about Hydra. He doesn't think he has any music on there. Why doesn't he? Because it isn't anything to do with his mission, he realizes. He used to like music, he's sure of it. The feeling associated with the bar, with the dancers, was pleasure. Of course, he was there with Steve, so it's not like there's a control to compare it to. This warrants further study.

"Can you show me?" he asks, and she nods. 

The store sells computers, too. She walks around the counter and shows him how to plug the cord into the computer and how to use iTunes, a subscription service, the library, and YouTube, for research into his own tastes. Up close, she smells like some kind of fruit and her eye makeup sparkles faintly on her lids. 

"You don't know how to do any of this?" she asks, and he shrugs rather than go into any of the things he does know how to do. She chews on her lip and transfers some songs to the mp3 player "to get you started." 

He thanks her and waves with his left hand as he leaves the store, mp3 player clutched in his right hand. He's rigged a glove. It's nothing fancy--a fingerless work glove with nylon pouches that stretch over his metal fingers. It's not nearly as high-tech as the type of disguise he vaguely remembers Hydra having for undercover and infiltration missions, but it does the trick for walking around town. People don't really look that closely, most of the time. He's seem a couple of folks walking around with similar nylon sleeves protruding out from under t-shirts; but theirs were printed with  designs that gave their arms the look of a tattoo without the pain or commitment. 

Not that he wants to judge--just because he finds some comfort in overwriting his scars doesn't mean that's for everyone. He's spent so much time trying to figure out what makes himself tick, he's beginning to realize how different his fucking brain is from everyone else's. So if they want a tattoo sleeve they can pull off, good for them. That's for people who don't worry about their memories, maybe; his brain is so ephemeral, a palimpsest constantly being overwritten, that he wants the marks he puts on his skin to damn well stay there.

But in the interest of his broken brain, now he has music. It's enough to get him through this mission. After--after, he can look for more. Not because he needs it to be loud, but because it's something he might enjoy.  

*

The base is.

The base is.

He remembers. So much was done to him in places like these. This isn't even one of the worst sites--he was not tortured here, by the standards of the time he spent in Zola's care. He was not cut open. He was not burned. There were no tests to determine the efficacy of his serum, how quickly he healed, what it might take for him to die. All that happened to him in Nice were missions--and the attendant memory wipes. The fucking chair.

Yeah, that was all. Just being used as a weapon and made to forget anything that could have connected him with his own humanity. 

All right. The base is staffed by  Hydra. He was able to secure the base in Newcastle without killing anyone, but this base is more sensitive and it's going to be more heavily guarded. If he has to kill someone, so be it. The people working here chose to do so. He has made his own choice.

He can be a weapon if he chooses to.

But only if he chooses to.

*

The base is exactly as he remembers. That's good, in many ways; he knows exactly where to go, how to get in, where the labs are (it's always labs, ugh), and where the strong and weak points are. It's even possible that some of the technicians who worked on him are still there. He has a brief moment where he has to lean over and dry heave, and then he gets himself under control. If those techs are there, he will...he will try not to kill them, actually, but if he slips, he won't feel bad about it. He's already made that decision.

He prepares. The tactical gear is heavy, but he feels more secure with it on. He heals quickly, and from wounds that would kill baseline humans, but it still hurts. He has seen more than enough of his insides. He prefers them to  _stay_  on the inside. The tactical vest will at least slow a gutshot down. 

He waits until night. He slips on a jacket over the tactical gear. Concealment is important when you're wearing an armory. 

The jacket is kind of dorky. It reminds him of something that Steve would wear. Though possibly--probably--without as many weapons strapped in easy-draw positions all over his body. Something tells him that Steve doesn't walk around with knives on his ribs and thighs. Something tells him that the knife was always his job. 

The knives are a comfort. The handguns, likewise. But what really has him grinning to himself from the alley next to the old factory are the grenades. 

*

A shadow slinks alongside the factory wall. There are guards, but they don't notice the shadow, don't see when an arm swings in an underhand throw. A tiny pieces of shadow detaches itself from the night and rolls through the doorway behind them. They don't notice a figure hunched over, and they certainly don't hear him counting. 

They fucking well notice the explosion, though. 

The guards chase it down, and Barnes slips in the door. They know he's coming now, but that's all right. This is one of the scenes of the ongoing crime that was done to him, decade by decade, and the screeching in the back of his head has him ready to meet violence with violence. He sheds the jacket to give him easier access to his weapons and kicks it to the side of the hallway. He'll want it on his way out. He puts the earbuds in and turns on the mp3 player. If these assholes try to use the words, he won't be able to hear it. 

The first beats of the album the girl in the shop recommended to him come on and a young man starts to talk about femurs on the ceiling like a chandelier. Barnes is pleased. The music is thematically appropriate and most important, it is loud enough that he won't be able to hear anyone talking to him. He makes a note to listen to it again when he can actually _listen_ to it. 

No need for directions this time. He stalks through the hallways, ignoring the alarm that he can hear pulsing even over the music. Three guards meet him at the top of the stars that lead down to the Asset's maintenance room. They have guns drawn. The man on the left's hands are shaking. The corners of his mouth pull into a grin without his conscious direction. The man in the center visibly blanches. Good. This is a benefit of going without the mask. Intimidated people tend to err. 

Case in point: the goon in the middle fires without taking time to properly aim. Barnes deflects the bullet with his metal arm and rolls forward as the flanking guards raise their guns to fire. He comes up right in front of them, forcefully blocking the guard on the left's firing gun with his metal arm. Well, it would be a block, were a normal human doing the move. Since it's him, the snapping sound is the guard's radius and ulna. He shrieks and drops the gun, and Barnes catches it. He ducks and sweeps his leg as the center guard fires again, knocking the man to the ground, then comes up to punch the last guard. The crunch of the man's cheekbone breaking is unpleasant against his flesh hand, but would have been far more devastating had he used his left hand. He disarms the man and shoves him against the wall. 

He turns and steps on the man on the floor, pinning him in place while he fishes restraints out of one of his many pockets. The man with the broken arm has been more or less neutralized by his injury. The man with the broken cheekbone is blearily trying to pat his face. Barnes ties up the man on the floor--wrists and ankles and a gag--then ties up his compatriots and binds them all together. They'll keep till later. 

He forces the door and starts on his way to the maintenance room (down, of course; the Asset was never kept in a room with windows.) The screech in his head has not been quieted by overpowering these guards. 

The screech gets louder as he approaches the maintenance room. Sweat beads along his forehead, the small of his back, and the tactical vest suddenly feels far too tight although objectively, the compression hasn't changed. He takes three deep breaths, concentrating on making the inhalation longer than the exhalation. This is not a good time to hyperventilate. He pulls the earbuds out of his ears. There's no one in the room and suddenly the beats are another source of distress instead of a help.

The door is locked, with a biometric scanner and a vocal activated lock, neither of which he has the means to open. On the other hand, if Hydra really wanted to keep their doors locked, they shouldn't have given him a metal arm. He winds up and hits the door until it surrenders. The alarm has been going continuously, but it blares out a new note. Annoying. 

He slides in through the door and looks. The static in his brain is now competing with the alarms. The chair always looks smaller than he expects, looming larger in his memory than in actuality, but it's pretty damn big nonetheless. He licks his lips and breathes again. His pulse is elevated, his respiration uneven. This is where they destroyed him. 

Never again. 

The sound of his fist crashing into the chair surprises him; he hadn't yet decided to move, but he is. The restraints that caged him while he was reshaped and rewritten crumple beneath his metal hand. His flesh hand braces against the leather as he moves up to the halo. The sound of metal on metal as he shreds it is deeply satisfying. He continues stripping the machine of the parts that made it work until it is only a chair. Then, his knife is in his flesh hand, and he rips through the leather, stuffing leaking out of the gashes like some kind of malignant snow, and he bends the arms over the destroyed seat, and no one will ever, ever sit in it again. 

His teeth are chattering with emotion that feels like cold, but he feels better. The cryotube is not there--of course not, because he was not there; the cryotube is probably still in DC, and  _that's_ a thought that sends a wave of nausea through his stomach--but the computers they used to assess his physical state are there. Not for long though. He hefts a monitor consideringly, and throws it across the room. It makes a satisfactory smash. He follows it with the others; it's not that they hold any information, but they were used to expose his inner workings to the people using him, and it pleases him to destroy them. He rends the computers to their component parts, then pulls those apart. 

He is sweating, but at least now it's from exertion as well as distress. 

There's nothing left in the room that could possibly ever be used to wipe anyone again. A lot of debris, sure, but the equipment is definitely fucked. Barnes takes it in, and only now realizes that this was his goal all along: making sure no one here could make another him. 

How many Hydra bases where he could be replicated are there? At least one on each continent. His memory is unreliable. He needs more information to be sure. But he's just defined his new mission: taking down every fucking place Hydra might make another Asset, and destroy another person. 

There are still labs here. His work isn't done. He takes one last look at the maintenance room, commits its devastation to memory to be pulled out and admired whenever needed. He nods, and turns to the door. 

Fuck!  _Fuck_. He might as well have kept the fucking earbuds in, for as much good hearing did for his situational awareness. There's someone in the  _door_ , there's someone in the damn door,  and he's broken this fucking chair, but that doesn't mean there aren't others, that doesn't mean they can't dope him up and take him somewhere else. He has two guns drawn and aimed at the door before he even means to. 

The figure silhouetted in the doorway steps forward. Barnes feels that single step like a fist to his solar plexus. 

It isn't Hydra. 

It's Steve. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Barnes is listening to "Body and Blood" by Clipping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZAPtFRpuu8
> 
> The chapter title is from "Rita" by Los Lobos, which if you changed Rita to Steve is one of the Buckiest songs I know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnSRyms0Nys
> 
> I have begun a tumblr (still figuring it out, quite frankly, but if you want to say hello, I am here): https://www.tumblr.com/blog/deisderium
> 
> Thank you for reading! If you have commented or kudo'ed, your response to this fic is like a magical puppy dragon I hold next to my heart. Also I figured out how to see subscriptions to this fic and had to lie down for a moment out of DELIRIOUS JOY, thank you all. <3


	6. (No Good At Goodbyes)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes realizes he is still pointing the guns at Steve and lowers them hastily. He knows his memory is porous where it's not fragile, but he's certain he and Steve don't have that kind of relationship when he's making his own decisions.

Objectively, Barnes only stares at Steve with his mouth hanging open for a couple of seconds. Subjectively, it feels like months. The fact that Steve is gaping at him too is no comfort. 

How did Steve find him? He didn't send him the European files, and he didn't send him a goddamn thing about his plan, so how is he  _here_?  

Barnes realizes he is still pointing the guns at Steve and lowers them hastily. He knows his memory is porous where it's not fragile, but he's certain he and Steve don't have that kind of relationship when he's making his own decisions. 

"Bucky." Maybe Barnes isn't the only one feeling like he's been punched in the gut. Steve's voice is thin, almost a whisper, and a memory comes rocketing out of the murky depths; Steve talked like this when he was trying not to cough, as if not fully voicing his words could stave off an asthma attack. 

Barnes can't help the way his eyes are traveling up and down Steve's body, looking for signs of damage, but he seems fine, except for the shadows under his eyes, visible even in the limited view of his face left by his cowl. He's bigger than Barnes remembered, shoulders wide in a tactical suit similar to the one he wore on the helicarrier; thankfully not as "look at me, I make a great target" as the suit in the Smithsonian, even with a star on his chest. He is also more real. Barnes has been thinking about him a lot, which is fitting considering that he features in most of the positive memories Barnes has dredged up. But the memory of him could never be as vivid as his physical presence, and Barnes has fucking well tattooed him on his body without really considering what Steve might make of that. Barnes's heart is pounding harder than it was while he was trashing this room and his tongue feels thick and stupid in his mouth. 

Steve's scanning him too. Shame for him; the view's not nearly as good. The shadows under Barnes's eyes are more like cavernous pits, though at least he's showered recently and his clothes are cleanish. Not much he can do about the serious case of crazy eyes that he has even on a good day, much less a day where he's broken apart the fucking  _chair_ and been surprised by the one person in the world he both most wants to see and is most terrified of seeing. He can't say Steve's name out loud. He should have kept thinking of him as Rogers. Maybe then he'd have had enough distance to force himself to speak. 

 _"Cap?"_  A woman's voice speaks from the earwig in Steve's headpiece. Romanoff, most likely. 

"Found the room," Steve replies, eyes not leaving Barnes's. "I need a few minutes." 

" _Exits are secure_ ," a male voice replies. 

"I'll catch up with you shortly," Steve says, and pulls the cowl off his head. The woman is still talking, but Steve isn't listening anymore. Barnes can't help staring at his face. The last time he saw him, he was bruised and bleeding where Barnes had punched him, cheekbone shattered, eyes red from burst blood vessels. There's no sign of it any longer, of course, or of the bullets Barnes had shot him with, but he has to bite the inside of his lip on an inarticulate noise of shame. Regret. There are so many awful things that he was made to do; this should not be any worse. No one even died. 

"Do you know who you are?" Steve's voice is low. Gentle. It's kind of awful, that gentleness; it's directed at a person who no longer exists, and Barnes doesn't deserve it. 

"A little," Barnes manages. 

Steve smiles like Barnes merits it. He can't stand it. 

"Aren't you afraid?" Barnes says. 

Steve's smile doesn't go away, but it slides sideways. "Are you?" he asks.

Barnes huffs out a breath of air faster than he means to. "Fucking terrified." 

Steve  _laughs_ , and it's sunshine and puppies and chocolate, and that's why he's scared. In these incomplete flashes of memory, he gets the idea that Steve is the best person he's ever known, and he'd do just about anything for him, even now. Steve wouldn't even have to wipe him or torture him. All he'd have to do is ask. 

So in a way, it's a relief when the next thing Steve says is to ask for what he can't give, just so Barnes can prove he can say no. 

"You could come in with me." The woman's voice is still talking from the headpiece, asking for Steve to respond, to update her on his situation. Steve ignores her, eyes still fixed on Barnes's face.  

"I almost killed you." 

Now Steve's smile is almost blinding. "But you didn't. You pulled me out of the river. Didn't you?" 

Barnes nods, even while he says, "I can't. There's still some things I need to do." And he's pretty sure that if he turns himself over to the Avengers or whatever's left of SHIELD, or to any government's tender mercies, the best he can expect is a long time in a small cage. They're not going to let him destroy the chairs. 

"Was that you in Newcastle?" Barnes nods again. "And you sent me the intel."  _Well, obviously, Steve_.

Barnes jerks his chin toward the shattered equipment. "I'm making sure they can never make another me." 

Steve's face goes soft, watery. "Was this--" 

"It was the chair. One of them. Where they wiped me between missions." Barnes shrugs, then lets his vision sharpen. "How'd you find me? Did you track me?" 

Captain America turns bright red. Memories ping Barnes's brain like fish surfacing from the deep waters of forgetfulness. Steve's always blushed easy, even back when he was ninety pounds of elbows and cheekbones. "No, Buck. I've been looking for you, but I didn't think I'd find you here. Nat's been getting us data on what's left of Hydra--plus what you sent me--and we've been taking the opportunity to clean up while we were looking for you. This was just--" He shrugs. 

Barnes doesn't like coincidences, but he believes that Steve, at least, was only here to take out a base. Romanoff could have another plan in play. "Okay," he says. "Don't--Please. Don't track me." 

Steve's face does something complicated. Barnes's heart gives him a preview of what arrhythmia might feel like. "You don't have to run. I could help--" 

Barnes shakes his head sharply. Steve steps forward, and Barnes's heart accelerates further. He wishes he were a normal human being, not a patchwork of horror and memory loss. Maybe then he'd know what to do with Steve's outstretched hand. As it is, he can only stare at it like he's Cleopatra and Steve's trying to give him a nice handful of asp. 

"Cap--" Every muscle in Barnes's body tenses with the effort not to draw his guns at the woman in the doorway. Romanoff. The Black Widow. The one who dumped Hydra's files onto the internet, in addition to Steve's ally, and therefore not someone he wants to point a gun at unless she makes him. A dizzying fragment of memory: dry air, dust, the gleam of bright sun along a gun barrel. 

Oh. He doesn't think it would be the first time he pointed a gun at her. 

"Going radio silent, Cap," she says. "Not exactly good operational procedure."

"I know." Steve looked at her briefly when she came into the doorway, but his eyes are already fixed back on Barnes's face, blue as the sea and full of expectations. God, what does he do with this? "Sorry." He doesn't sound sorry.

"I can see there were extenuating circumstances." She looks Barnes over, more assessing but less intense than Steve. Who knows what his face is doing, besides probably turning the crazy eyes up as far as the dial goes. He can hear his own breathing, a ragged, uneven sound. She slides sideways until she's no longer blocking the doorway. It helps. "Got a lot of guys tied up out front. Wilson could use a hand till the DGSI gets here."

"Bucky..." Now Barnes is getting the full power of Steve's pleading eyes, and it was hard enough to say no the  _first_ time, and if seeing Steve this once is enough to make all his systems shudder and malfunction and want to go offline, what would it be like if he  _did_ come in with him, in whatever vision Steve's entertaining where he doesn't end up dead in five minutes or locked up for the rest of his already-unnatural life, and it might be the punishment he deserves, but he can't do it. He can't be a prisoner again. He'd rather eat a bullet. 

"Steve," the Widow says softly, "go help Sam." 

Steve makes an inarticulate sound of protest deep in his throat. Barnes catches his eye--it's not difficult; neither one of them has looked the fuck away since Steve got here--and says, "I told you what I'm going to do." 

Steve's expression firms up. He nods once, decisively. "You know how to get in touch." He casts one last look at Barnes--and it's too much, it's going to flense the flesh from his bones and leave him bare and exposed and nothing but raw nerves--then jams the helmet back on his head and leaves. 

Then it's just Barnes and the Widow. Her hands are loose, spread wide where he can see them to show she's not armed. He's not stupid enough to think that would make her harmless even if he couldn’t see at least two guns and six knives on her person, but accepts it as a show of faith that she has no immediate intent to hurt or end him. 

"I need to know," she begins, then cuts herself off. "I'd like to know what your plans are."

He shakes his head. "I told him. Going to keep this--" He waves a hand at himself, at the room. "--from happening again." 

"What's your plan for Cap?" Her gaze is direct, assessing. 

"Lady, are you asking if my intentions are honorable?" His voice takes on a hint of an accent without his meaning it to, and it shakes him, reminds him of how little control over himself he really has. "I don't have a plan for him." He barely has a plan for himself. 

"All right. You could come in with him, you know. Whatever you're thinking they'd do...it wouldn't have to play out like that." He's already shaking his head, but she talks over any protest he could make. "I was Red Room. I defected. Nobody put me in a box."

"Instead you work for them now," he says. 

"I did," she admits. "After Insight...well. I'm working for myself these days."

He tilts his head. "So am I." 

"You might have more options than you think you do." 

"Not until I finish with these."

"In that case...good luck with it. Just keep it in mind." 

She turns to go, her boots crunching on debris. The ruined door squeals in protest as she exits, and her footsteps echo in the stairwell until even his hearing can't detect her. He's alone.

He staggers back, sucking air like he's been holding his breath.  He's sweating and shaking like the human disaster that he is, but it's okay. He held it together while they were there.

Well. If Steve and his friends are handling cleanup with the goons, he can finish up here. Now all that's left is destruction, and that he can do shaking and sweating and with his eyes closed if he needs to. Talking is hard. Explosions are easy. He sets plastique around the room, just to be sure no one will ever be able to reconstruct anything in it, and sets up a detonator. 

Does he trust Steve and his buddies?

With Hydra goons? Sure. With his freedom? They've already been over this. He puts the earbuds in and rests a finger over the play button, in case they missed someone with the codes, but he doesn't hit play just yet. He listens as he ascends the steps, but the base seems empty. He retrieves his jacket and slinks up the stairs to the rooftop door.

Steve, the Widow, and--yep, that's Wilson, all right. The three of them have fifteen people restrained on the alley in front of the factory. Romanoff squats at eye level with a few of them, talking; the interrogation before the interrogators get their hands on these people. Excellent. He presumes the authorities are on their way. 

He slides over the side of the building, poking holes in the brick with his metal fingers and jumping from impromptu handhold to impromptu handhold. Once he's on the ground, he hits the detonator. 

The explosion isn't big enough to destroy the building, but the ground rumbles, the walls shake, and the building emits smoke.

There's more of the chair rooms out there, but this is a good start.   
It's time to go, he knows it is. He should already be blocks away, fading into the streets. He needs to get back to his hotel room, sit down, and shake until he gets his shit together. Then he needs to gather his materiel and leave the scene of the crime. Not everyone looking for him is just going to let him walk away. 

His hand rests on his jacket, layers of cotton and Kevlar and leather over where the tags are inked on his chest.   
"Goodbye, Steve," he whispers to the night, too quietly for even enhanced ears a block away to hear him. 

Then he turns and starts walking, fading into the night even as he hears sirens approaching. 


	7. Interludes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve is aware that he is not objective in the slightest where Bucky Barnes is concerned. He hasn't been since the 1920s. He certainly wasn't in the 1940s--it's in every child's history book that he disobeyed orders and jumped out of a civilian plane unarmed and by himself to go find him. They make it sound almost casual, when he remembers the adrenaline, the determination, every muscle in his body, heart to asshole, tensing as he jumped into the open air.

July 23, 2014: Paris

Steve is aware that he is not objective in the slightest where Bucky Barnes is concerned. He hasn't been since the 1920s. He certainly wasn't in the 1940s--it's in every child's history book that he disobeyed orders and jumped out of a civilian plane unarmed and by himself to go find him. They make it sound almost casual, when he remembers the adrenaline, the determination, every muscle in his body, heart to asshole, tensing as he jumped into the open air. His bias is no surprise to anyone; not him, and certainly not Sam or Natasha, who's been joining them on their international manhunt-slash-Hydra-takedown spree when she's between other work.

He is also aware that he is riding on a crest of emotion that probably approaches mania, and there's inevitably going to be a crash, but...

"He looked good, though, didn't you think?" 

Natasha meets his eyes. It's not the first time he's said it. It won't be the last. They're in a hotel attached to the Charles de Gaulle airport, waiting at the bar for Sam to come down from his shower. In the morning, they're headed back to New York to plan their next attack. Steve wants to say fuck it and chase after Bucky so bad he can taste it stronger than his actual drink, a French 75 that the bartender recommended. It's too sweet, but the taste sent him into a memory. He had it before, during the war. He'd been in Paris with Bucky and Morita, helping some resistance contacts of Bucky's ferry documents out of the city. There'd been a successful handoff to a British agent, and they'd celebrated with drinks in an underground pub of sorts. It's just coincidence--he's in a city they went together, the drink is a local one--but he can taste his own history with every sip and it's hard not to take it as a sign. 

"He looks better than he did in DC," Nat allows,  _also_ not for the first time. Then she tilts her head. "But, Steve...you know that better doesn't actually mean good? He was having a pretty hard time holding it together." 

 Steve knows. Bucky's voice had shifted from toneless to something close to what Steve would have expected to hear from him in 1938 and back again. His breathing was mostly ragged. He looked like he had dropped weight since DC. He was twitchy as fuck. But he had set himself a goal and was doing it, and the goal wasn't finishing what he had started on the helicarrier and murdering Steve, the goal was the same as Steve's: taking out Hydra. But that wasn't right either; Steve could admit to himself that there was more than a soupcon of best served cold in what he wanted, but Bucky was just making sure that Hydra could never make another him. 

"He's doing what he needs to do," Steve says. He doesn't add,  _and when he's done, he'll come back to me_ , because the thing is, he's not sure. He doesn't think Bucky can heal himself by tearing down the people who hurt him. He can't glue himself back together with willpower and bubblegum. But hope burns in him, bright and all-consuming, that if he just lets Bucky go, he'll return when he knows he doesn't have do it on his own.

*

December 14, 2014:  DC

Sam Wilson knows he's not actually well-adjusted, but he feels proud of how well he fronts. He's been working on it for years. He has put himself back together, piece by piece, coping mechanism by coping mechanism, and it was work, and now he takes what he's learned and tries to help other people who've been through the same kind of shit. That's not a bad way to pay it forward. And what he's doing now, with Steve, that's a good thing too. Hydra's the kind of dirty that stains everything it comes in contact with. Wiping that out is just letting the rest of the world shine. 

He's just not sure it's the best thing for Steve. 

Steve was flying high for a while after Nice, but as the months go on and there's no word from one James Buchanan Barnes, even Steve's irrepressible energy has started to flag. There's less bounciness in his step, less assholery of the on-your-left type. More determined focus when they go out on missions. 

And the thing is, Sam's got no idea what's best in this situation. Is it Barnes coming to Steve? Is it Barnes turning himself in? He's pretty sure it's not Steve putting his whole goddamn life on hold to chase after his brainwashed BFF. And Barnes might be healing, but he might not be. The way Steve talks about Nice, you'd think he was fine, but when it comes to Barnes, Steve has a pair of glasses Pollyanna would think were too rose-colored. Nat's a more reliable source, and she's cagey at best when she talks about Barnes, at least around Steve. Sam makes a mental note to have that conversation with her sometime, but not tonight. 

Tonight, Steve's visiting, and they're going to get dinner and relax, and tomorrow they're going to run around the National Mall (Sam will stupidly try to keep up with Captain Speed Feet and end up collapsing, he knows from experience), and then Steve will go to New York to hang with his Avenger buddies for Christmas before they go back out in the new year to look for Hydra and whatever's left of Sergeant Barnes. 

As Sam drives Steve to the restaurant--a farm-to-table place in Foggy Bottom--there's a third presence in the car. Steve is probably feeling the Longing for the Missing Barnes, but all Sam can see is Steve Rogers's Perpetual Cloud of Gloom. But even at his gloomiest, Steve never passes up a meal--with his supersoldier metabolism, he really can't--and by the time they have  mussels and garlic wings and beer on the table, Steve is making a concerted effort to exhibit more perk, and Sam is pretending not to watch him for signs of incipient breakdown. 

Then the food is on the table--meatloaf for Sam, a burger, a steak, and a plate of pasta for Steve, and Sam  _knows_ he's going to get dessert, too--and there's a couple minutes of silence as they give it the attention it deserves. 

"So, Christmas in New York," Sam says, once he's pushed his plate away and Steve is still determinedly chomping his was through creamy vegetable bacon bucatini. "Are you looking forward to it?" 

"I dunno, Sam," Steve mumbles around a tomato. "I haven't really--Christmas hasn't been much of a thing for me since I got here." 

Sam can understand that--holidays are a tough time if you've lost someone, and when Steve woke up after the ice, he'd lost just about everyone. And now he's found and lost Barnes again. But even with all that loss, he's still found at least a few people this century. "Not even Christmas in Avengers Tower? I bet Tony does it up." 

"I think Tony and Pepper are going to be in Malibu," Steve says, a little shamefacedly. "It's probably just going to be me and Bruce." Which Sam interprets to mean that Steve is going to spend most of the holiday by himself, moping about Bucky. 

"Sounds quiet." Sam messes with his napkin and watches Steve eat for a minute. "If you want quiet, that's great. If you want something a little noisier and with maybe actual human interaction that's not your teammates, you could come to my ma's house in Harlem." 

Now Steve looks up and meet's Sam's eyes. "I couldn't possibly intrude--"

"It wouldn't be intruding, man. I wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't already cleared it." Mrs. Wilson did not raise an asshole. "There'll be so many aunts and uncles and cousins, one more's not going to make much of a difference."

But Sam already knows Steve's going to say no when he starts shaking his head. "I appreciate the offer." Steve finally pushes his last plate away. "I just...I don't think I'll be very good company." 

"I can understand that. It's been a rough year." Sam doesn't say that he'd be welcome to just sit and be around people, even though it's true; he offered, and now it's up to Steve to reject or accept, and Sam to respect that. Steve's got to make his own decisions, even if they're the wrong ones.

The waiter comes over to clear their plates and Sam thinks they're going to leave it at that, because crossing continents chasing rumors of dudes with metal arms and taking down Hydra base after Hydra base is easier than just saying what you're feeling. Sam doesn't know exactly what that is, on account of Steve won't say it, but he knows that it's big, the biggest thing in Steve Rogers's world right now.

But Steve surprises him, leaning forward once the waiter is gone. "I keep thinking he's going to come back. I keep thinking that we'll find him, that he'll--he'll let me help him. I just want to help him."

"He might not be ready yet, Steve. Six months isn't that long of a time to get over seventy years of torture." Steve flinches, but they've both seen the files. There's really not another word for it.

"I know that," Steve says. "I do. Intellectually. But..." He taps his giant chest, the seat of his disbelief.

"You miss him," Sam says. He can say that for sure, whether or not he really understands the full shape of Steve's grief. 

"Well, yeah." Steve's face wobbles, and Sam hopes for one minute that Steve will go ahead and let it out, everything that he's carrying, but maybe a restaurant wasn't the best place to do this. Steve visibly stuffs his emotions back in whatever kind of 1940s-style satchel he's been keeping them in. "But he'll get there. We'll find him, and he'll come in." His voice is the kind of steady that's trying really hard for casual, and right after that, he changes the subject. 

For the first time in Sam's experience, Captain America passes on dessert.

*

December 31, 2014: New York 

Natalia Romanoff believes in masks. She has built up quite a collection in the decades of her work. For all that she's known to be deadly, anger is her mask that gets the least wear. Boredom is a useful one; there are so many things one can hide behind it, and most people would rather see rage than indifference on the face of the person taking them apart. Happy gets a surprising amount of use. Most powerful men like to see a woman smiling up at them and hanging on their every word, and if it looks genuine, all the better. 

But the mask she likes the best is a tiny smile, the kind that only uses about a quarter of the muscles of a grin, the kind that says the person receiving it is in on a little joke between friends. This is the one she turns on Steve Rogers as they stand at one of the glass walls of Avengers Tower, looking out over the city as Tony's party goes on behind them, glasses of champagne in their hands. 

The fact that she means everything the mask is meant to say doesn't make it less of a mask. There are very few circumstances in which she could spontaneously express an emotion, and surrounded by strangers at a party simply isn't one of them. But she's let Steve see her reacting in the past, and there are jokes and affection between them, so maybe right now the mask is enough.

She genuinely likes Steve. That time they spent together on the run from the government to uproot a Hydra conspiracy burrowed into their employer really brought them together. There are people she trusts and people she likes, and it's rare that both traits overlap. (Of course, all of these categories are outnumbered by all the people she neither likes nor trusts.) 

At the moment, she's not sure Steve would notice anyone's emotion, real or manufactured, besides his own. 

He's not bad at masks himself. All night, he's been smiling at the right times, laughing at other people's jokes, raising his glass to toast. And he hasn't so much as looked morose, but he goes very quiet when no one's talking to him. Because he's big and strong and sincere, people think he's all surface, outside and inside a perfect match. People forget he was an actor before he was a warrior; they forget that Captain America is not Steve Rogers, just a part Steve plays. 

"Penny for your thoughts," she says. His eyes in the reflection in the mirror dart to her. His eyebrows lift. 

"How's Clint?" he asks instead. 

"Celebrating off site." 

"I thought he was out of the psych eval." His eyebrows draw together. Thank god for his eyebrows--they're a marvelous tell.

"He is." Six months, they'd evaluated him. After all that, he was entitled to holidays on the farm with Laura and the kids. Not that any of that is Steve's business. "He really is celebrating. He's been cleared for duty again." 

"I'm glad to hear it." And there's that mask again; he really is glad for Clint, but there's a lot more going on underneath. Given his circumstances, it's no surprise that he's one of the loneliest people that she knows, but a big part of that is how little he lets others in. Maybe that's a result of being out of place in time, or maybe it's a 1940s thing, or maybe Steve Rogers is just bullheaded and doesn't want to admit he can't do every damn thing all by himself. 

She's one to talk, but at least she's self-aware about it. And at least she's made progress. She's let people help her. Clint was the first, but he wasn't the last. 

"To absent friends." She raises her champagne flute expectantly. 

He gives her a sharp look in the window, but clinks his glass dutifully to hers. The bubbles are sharp against her tongue. 

"You can talk about him, you know," she says. 

He turns from the reflection to look at her directly. "What's there to say? I can trace the trail of where he's probably been through the reports of damage to Hydra. But there hasn't been anything since December eleventh."

"Oran," she says automatically. The reports from Algeria are unclear about whether the facility had ever been used to hold the Soldier--the level of destruction was too complete--but Natasha suspects yes. He'd told them that was what he was aiming for. "Maybe he took some time off for Christmas."

"Maybe he's hurt, doing this all by himself with no back up. Maybe he's--" 

Natasha gives herself only a fraction of a second to enjoy the irony of Steve complaining about someone else doing too much on his own, and then lays a hand on his arm. Those solid muscles strain with tension. Maybe she should worry about his champagne flute. "He's pretty hard to hurt, Steve. We're keeping an eye out, I promise. But that's not what I meant. We talk a lot about what he might be doing now. I was just wondering what your friend was like." 

Steve's shoulders slump down fractionally. "Pretty different from the man we saw." 

Natasha snorts inelegantly. "Well, sure. I'm assuming Bucky didn't usually shoot you and beat you up." 

Steve smiles. Natasha gives herself an internal high five. This is the first one all night that's looked even remotely genuine. "No, he was usually beating people up on my behalf, when we were kids. I'd start fights, and he'd finish them." His smile twists. "I guess once we went to war, he started shooting people for me too."  

"Okay, so he had your back." Natasha glosses over the self-recrimination. "What else?" 

"He had a way with words. People always liked him about five minutes after meeting him. He--you remind me of him, actually." 

Natasha allows one eyebrow to arch up, the wry quarter-twist of her lips to deepen by another twenty-five percent. "Because I'm so likable?" 

"Because you both knew what to say to people." He catches her eye, sips his champagne. "It's not as easy as either of you make it look."

"Steve Rogers. I'm flattered." She actually really is. She doubts Steve compares many people to Bucky.

He looks back out the window. "I'm guessing his approach is a little more direct these days." 

And oh,  _there_  is it. "He might never be the person you remember," she says, not to be cruel, but because he needs the reminder. 

"That doesn't mean he's not worth saving," Steve says, so quietly that Natasha almost can't hear him over the countdown as the ball drops. 

 *

March 10, 2015: Manila

Steve is aware that he's not in a good place. For a year  _(a year, god damn it, Bucky, why won't you let me help you?_ ) he's been chasing after a ghost and only caught up to him once. If he asked, Sam would probably tell him that basing your emotional state on another person isn't healthy. But Sam's been keeping him company on the chase, regardless of his opinion, and Steve owes him and Nat more than he can possibly say. 

It helped, for most of the past year, that even if he couldn't see him, he could trace his path. Never where he was going to be, but where he had been, a trail of destruction traced in decimated Hydra bases and mysterious deaths. Nat has told him it's kicked up quite a fuss in the intelligence community, no one sure who's behind the murder and bombing spree, everyone blaming someone else, but Steve can't quite find it in his heart to give a shit about what Bucky's doing to global politics. He's had seventy years of torture with everyone but himself pulling his strings. If he needs a little global destabilization to find his way back to himself, so be it. 

But now he's... stopped? Gone to ground? ( _Anything but dead, God, please_ ) He hit two bases in January, and then nothing since. Nat says he's not dead, and Steve wants to believe her, but how would he know? If Bucky reappears to him only to be snatched away again, Steve doesn't know what he's going to do. Historically, he has not handled the loss of Bucky Barnes particularly well, though if nothing else, the present day seems to offer plenty of metaphorical airplanes to crash. Of course, he didn't actually die on the Valkyrie, so who knows if he could even get it right the second time around. 

These are not helpful thoughts, he reminds himself. Nat and Sam have both said, several times, that Bucky has been through hell and most likely needs time to get to someplace where he can even take help. Steve just can't help wishing that it was somewhere he could put eyes on him once in a while. 

Yesterday they took down an abandoned Hydra base in Manila, not far from a former military prison that was a now a park and major tourist destination, what the actual hell, Hydra. The base itself had been a resupply station rather than a laboratory, and hadn't had much useful left in it, though they'd at least found a couple of computers that hadn't been wiped, though Steve doubts there's much useful there. 

Sam is back at the hotel, skyping with his family, so Steve has taken himself off to walk around. He needs to burn off some of this energy anyway. He hasn't told Sam that today's Bucky's birthday; he's not sure why. He'd kind of hoped they'd run into Bucky yesterday, but then, he hopes that every mission, that the base they choose to attack will be the base Bucky is attacking.  It's only ever happened the once, and that was probably enough to spook Bucky forever, but he lives in hope. 

No, that's a lie; or if it isn't, it's the hope that's next-door neighbor to despair. 

The only time he's ever felt like this before was after Azzano, when Bucky was clearly hiding something, and Steve had let him hide it. Why had he done it? He'd seen the fucking table Bucky had been strapped to. He'd lifted him off of it, helped him walk when he could barely stand. Catalogued the cuts and bruises from whatever equipment Zola had strapped him to. 

Steve stops walking and closes his eyes. He'd known there was more to it. He'd heard Bucky waking at night--never screaming, but it wouldn't have taken enhanced hearing to catch the change in his breathing. If they were in the field, they'd huddled together--for warmth, for comfort, because whatever Steve Rogers needed, Bucky Barnes gave. And it had felt good to turn to him, to hold him while he shook from whatever nightmare--whatever memory--had him in its grasp. Like Steve was doing something for Bucky, who had always done so much for him. 

And it made it easy to go on in the daytime like everything was okay, like Bucky wasn't different than he'd been before, when Steve  _knew_ that he fucking well was, knew that at the very least, Bucky had battle fatigue in a dreadful way. But Steve had been so full of everything--a body without hurt was a miracle all its own, and finally, finally being able to  _do_ something to help instead of just imagine it. And Peggy: the personification of every dream he'd ever have save one. The one he'd been letting fall to pieces, because he could never imagine losing him. 

What an idiot he'd been. And now he has a second chance, but only if Bucky lets him help. And he knows, he does--he knows that's the most selfish way to think about it, but his chest is the memory of asthma if he thinks about Bucky on his own for too long.

Bucky wouldn't--he wouldn't punish Steve for failing him. He's not like that. It's only Steve who's small enough to think that, sometimes, in dark moments.

He's bent over with remembered pain, so he makes himself stand up and open his eyes. The streets are full of people politely ignoring him. He's in Manila in 2015, not anywhere in Europe in the 1940s. He sucks in a couple of deep breaths to remind himself that he can, that his chest takes in air as smoothly as a bellows, not in uneven, heaving gasps from a narrow ribcage. 

Across the street is a shopfront proclaiming Art Bar. He surreptitiously wipes his eyes and walks in, on the assumption that if he's going to have a come apart, it'd be better to do it inside instead of in front of god and everyone, and also, he's hardly picked up a pencil in the last year. But once he's in the store is surprisingly soothing, rows of paints and colored pencils and stacks of sketchbooks everywhere. 

He stops in front of a display of watercolors and picks up a tube of pale blue. He'd grown up colorblind. He'd drawn Bucky a thousand times, a record of his transformation from boy to adult like the stages of metamorphosis, but it was a record in sepia and gray. When he'd come out of the Vita-Ray tube, lungs filling to capacity for the first time, Peggy's lipstick had struck him like a flag, the first true red he'd ever seen. But in Azzano, he'd pulled Bucky off the table and seen for the first time that Bucky's eyes were the color of the sea in a storm, and even in the middle of hell, it had struck him. 

Fuck. The watercolor tube has burst in his hand. 

The woman behind the counter is extremely nice about it. She lets him scrub his hands in the employee restroom, and only partly out of embarrassment, he buys a set of drawing pencils, a set of waterproof pens, a sketchbook, some watercolor paper, a travel set of half-pan watercolors with a folding palette, and a brush with a reservoir that holds its own water. He wants to draw Bucky. It feels right, on his birthday, to fall to pieces a little and try to find the color of his eyes in memory if he can't just see him. 

Maybe he'll even find the fortitude to talk about him to Sam. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I based the restaurant in DC on Founding Farmers: https://www.wearefoundingfarmers.com/menus/
> 
> The art supply store in Manila is Art Bar: https://artbar.ph/
> 
> I made a MCU timeline so I could see how dang long it was between Winter Soldier and Civil War, and dang, boys, that's a lot of time to get your act together. Next chapter we'll go back to Bucky's POV.
> 
> I am on the tumblrs at https://deisderium.tumblr.com/ (come say hi if you like!)
> 
> I take your kudos and comments and subscriptions, pile them up in a vault, and dive into them Scrooge McDuck style, so THANK YOU for letting me know that you enjoy this ridiculousness. <3


	8. (and there's no map)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes is tired. 
> 
> He has spent the last eight months chasing Hydra and his own history, a trail of blood and explosions. And it's not that he questions the necessity of ridding the world of Hydra, but he's been reborn twice now, and if his third life is so similar to his second, death upon death upon death, is he doing it wrong? Surely he can't only shape himself in blood and fire.

Barnes is tired. 

He has spent the last eight months chasing Hydra and his own history, a trail of blood and explosions. And it's not that he questions the necessity of ridding the world of Hydra, but he's been reborn twice now, and if his third life is so similar to his second, death upon death upon death, is he doing it wrong? Surely he can't only shape himself in blood and fire. 

Steve and his companions fight Hydra, but they are human in a way that Barnes is not. Their mission is important to them, but it is not the sum of all their parts the way it is for him. His mission should not be all that he is. It is difficult to be human otherwise. 

It's too easy to fall back on the skills that are part of him now: the clean calculation of a shot over distance, the satisfying thunk of a knife into the target, the ease of infiltration that has him skimming through crowds with no one noticing, even now. It's the only thing that's easy; he is much better at death and dismemberment than interaction with other people.

He is in Stockholm. There is no Hydra base here that he knows of. He hit two in a week after the new year, one in Syria and one in Poland. The Syrian one was deserted, easy, but the one in Warsaw...the scientist died. He hadn't meant to kill her. She had ducked, turning a leg shot into a gut wound. It had seemed kinder to kill her quickly rather than let her bleed out once he saw that her liver was perforated. Her blood had dried in the grooves between the plates of his metal arm. he has scrubbed it and scrubbed it, but the lines still seem lined with red. This is not objective fact, only how it looks to him. 

He has killed before. He has killed since gaining self determination in DC. Why is this different?

He is in a hotel in the medieval part of Stockholm. The streets are so narrow in places that cars cannot pass through, the roads pitted cobblestones that would quickly destroy their undercarriages. He doesn't know why he chose to come here. He has no associations with this place. There's nothing important here, no Hydra, no memories. 

The woman at the hotel desk was scared of him. She didn't say anything, but the way she looked at him and her body language were evidence enough. What had his face been doing? He was dressed in civilian clothes, and should not have looked threatening, but somehow she knew, even without his weapons in sight. She knew that he was not human the way she was. 

His room overlooks the water. One of the museums he wandered through today said the name of the city came from logs the residents floated in the ports to make it difficult for enemy ships to navigate in medieval times. The image refuses to leave him. He imagines his mind an ocean, the gaps in his memory floating bundles of logs, keeping the knowledge of the things he's done away from him. 

More memories of his missions for Hydra have come back to him, recorded in the second journal, a composition notebook. He writes in code, when he remembers to, in a hodgepodge of languages. His handwriting is angular, uneven; sometimes cramped with multiple sentences between the lines on the page, sometimes sprawling across most of the page. Along with his notebooks, he has pens in multiple colors, a pack of highlighters, sticky notes and paperclips. It makes him feel calmer to codify the memories, sort by color and place and meaning. Everything else about them is just so bleak. 

He thinks he said no--he must have. When they first captured him, at least. But mostly he remembers a constant screech in the back of his head, mental noise that was never silent, what little was left of his personality trying and failing to cohere. It was not like the physical pain that came after missions, whether through injury or from his handlers or simply from the wipe, but it hurt nonetheless. And worse: it was a constant state of not-saying-no to what they made him do. 

He killed children. He killed people that were nothing but collateral damage. If there were any truth to appearances, his arm wouldn't just have a little red star on it, it would be bloody to the shoulder. The woman at the front of the hotel was right to be frightened. 

Steve knows that Barnes was programmed to kill him. He has chosen to overlook or forgive this. But does he know the rest of the Winter Soldier's kill list? Could he possibly forgive all of that? 

He flips through the composition notebook. He didn't want to use one of the nicer notebooks to list his fucking missions, but the cheap cardboard doesn't disguise what the missions were: Santiago. Pesahwar. Caracas. Phnom Penh. Kabul. Kigali. Fucking upstate New York,  _Jesus_. Cairo. Who knows how many others.

He has highlighted the names he remembers: a sickly orange for the missions where he was used by Hydra high command to punish their own. Those are the missions he feels least conflicted about. A terrible purple-pink for the ones that he thinks were only to make a point: spouses, children, siblings, friends. Bright searing yellow for collateral damage: no one Hydra cared about, just those they didn't prevent. An awful, thin brick-red that skips (some of the fibers were already dry when he uncapped it) for the ones that he suspects were Hydra's most hated enemies. The ones like Steve. 

He can't be sure of any of it, of course. His memories are coming back, but he doesn't trust them. He just writes them down and cross checks them as best he can with the files the Black Widow dumped online. It's been long enough that the data has been thoroughly tagged and set up into several wikis. He gets a certain grim amusement from marking articles useful or not, like any of the people who sorted this information would be impressed by the Winter Soldier giving his thumbs up or down. But it's like his notebooks writ large. Not that he would ever consider uploading these files--they are safest in hard copy only, unreadable to anyone who's not him. 

He opens the windows of his hotel room. The smell of brackish water comes in, and food. Night has fallen while he's been scribbling in his notebooks, and the touristy little area in which he's ensconced himself is enjoying itself. Sounds come in the open window: the slap of the water against the island's edge, distant vehicles, conversations blending in with one another, broken by the occasional bark of laughter or shout. Somewhere, a dog barks. A whole island full of people is out there, doing human things, and he is an impostor among them. 

He pulls the composition notebook to his chest and then throws it away. It hits the plaster wall with a  _thwock_ and then slides to the floor. He didn't throw it hard enough to compromise either the wall or the notebook. He has enough control for that, but it seems to be all of his control, because he has to blink rapidly as emotions threaten to spill out of his eyes. How could he be inhuman enough to not say no for all those years, but still human enough to cry about it now, when it did no one any good? 

No, be honest, Barnes; it wouldn't have done any good then, either. He could have cried all he liked and he still would have done all those things. 

He wishes all his memories were like the ones of Steve, where the worst thing about it was wanting to keep a few secrets: what he was becoming, the truth of his heart. But he had twenty-odd years of Steve and seventy years of committing horrors; it makes sense that he remembers more blood. 

His face is hot and wet with this emotion he doesn't want. He's a fucking horror show, crying for things he never intended to do, but has inarguably done, and crying for that younger self who was terrified of becoming a monster, and had no idea how far the road to monster would take him. He wishes he could send a letter through time to that younger self and tell him to fucking take the warmth of the night Steve had wrapped himself around Bucky's nightmare-wracked body, take what comfort had been on offer when he was good enough, simple enough to deserve it. 

But he wasn't entirely an innocent, even in that iteration, was he? He'd already bloodied his hands, shooting Nazi after Nazi; on Steve's behalf, yes, but also because they'd strapped him to the table and made him hurt, made him bleed, turned him into something he didn't recognize. Because he'd been a soldier, before he'd been the Soldier. All of him is threaded through with death. 

He turns his head into the nubby blanket on the hotel bed, gasping, wiping his eyes on the impersonal hotel pillowcase. The noise that comes out of him is half-laughter, half sob, but the jagged-edged sound of it at least helps him suck in breath, counting in-and-out until he's no longer wheezing and his heartbeat has started to slow. 

What a fucking mess he is. The only thing he's good for is killing. There's a whole range of human behavior out there he has no idea how to perform. He can make tea and coffee, but he has no idea how to cook a fucking meal. He buys prepacked food or street food from vendors. He could not hold a conversation that isn't transactional, or even many that are; witness the hotel worker downstairs. He remembers enjoying reading, but he can't remember a specific book that he liked. It's just flashes of reading aloud on the roof in Brooklyn, or on the fire escape, or around the campfire in Europe if they were secure enough to have a fire. He doesn't have any hobbies besides documenting his murders. 

No, that's not true. He has his tattoos. Three counts for a hobby, right? 

Okay, so maybe his personality is primarily murders tied together with string. Fine. He doesn't have to stay that way. He sits up, rubbing his eyes one more time, and grabs his backpack. His duffel bag has his clothes and weapons and his computer, but those are replaceable. The backpack is where he keeps his notebooks. He picks a new one, the cover printed with birds and flowers and uncaps a pen. 

He labels the top of a page:  **Things to Do to Be a Person**

He starts writing, not in order, but as items occur to him. 

**Cook a Fucking Meal like a God Damn Adult**

**Live in a Place--Not a Hotel** (This will help with item one.)

**Read Books (besides murder journals)**

**Get Another Tattoo--Learn to Use Machine?**

**Talk to People without Scaring Them (not just when i need something)**  (Bucky used to be good at this. If Barnes can't remember, he'll just have to learn.) 

He chews on the cap of his pen. This is a start. Maybe he can get proficient enough at the last one that his heart won't try to beat out of his chest when next he sees Steve. Because that's part of the end run of becoming a person, isn't it? Friendships with other people. With seven billion people in the world, give or take, he's sure there are at least a handful he'd like to know, but when it gets down to it, there's only one he's sure of. 

He rubs his hand over his face again and keeps writing. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Bjork's "Human Behavior." 
> 
> No one's really sure if the thing about the logs is true, but Stockholm does mean "log island."
> 
> [mandarou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mandarou/pseuds/mandarou) has done an *amazing* timeline of what comics timeline Bucky was up to while Hydra had him if you're interested, [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10878852/chapters/24170622)
> 
> We have gone back a little bit in time here to January. The two missions Barnes thinks about here are the same ones Steve mentioned in the last chapter.


	9. One Star in a Constellation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes likes Prague. He likes the river. He likes the bridges. He likes the red roofs and the feeling of history beneath his feet. He likes the astronomical clock. People were here, figuring out how the universe worked, long before James Buchanan Barnes was a consideration, and they will be here long after he is gone to dust. This city has seen worse problems than Barnes's. He hasn't even been defenestrated.  
> ______  
> Please check the end notes for warnings.

Barnes likes Prague. He likes the river. He likes the bridges. He likes the red roofs and the feeling of history beneath his feet. He likes the astronomical clock. People were here, figuring out how the universe worked, long before James Buchanan Barnes was a consideration, and they will be here long after he is gone to dust. This city has seen worse problems than Barnes's. He hasn't even been defenestrated. 

Barnes also likes his shitty little apartment. It's terrible, but it's his, for now. He has it set up to be defensible--every item of furniture placed where he can block points of entry, weapons hidden in conveniently grabbable locations, his larger weapons stashed beneath a floorboard--but it also has  _things_ in it that he picked himself for no other reason than he liked them. A green vase that had held sunflowers with petals like rust. A postcard of Charles Bridge. A stack of paperback books, and he was right; reading is fun. Reading is  _awesome_. He gets to go somewhere in his head and be someone that isn't him for a few hours. Chocolate bars--he has discovered that he likes very dark chocolate, the bitterness mixed in with the sweet. He likes chocolate with sea salt mixed in, or chili, or cinnamon. He pays cash every two weeks to a very badly dressed man with an indefensible comb over for the privilege of staying there. 

He does not have a routine as such, but he does have habits. He sleeps, usually badly, and gets up when he can't stand lying on the mattress any longer. He writes while he drinks coffee or tea in the mornings. He's been trying to reach for good memories these days. He remembered his sister Rebecca a few weeks back, and he's been trawling his brain for more of her. He remembered making bread with her, stirring in raisins and cinnamon. He thinks he could make it, maybe. He's not sure if he should, without Becca. Maybe the taste is best left with her, in memory

He looked her up. She's a footnote on his Wikipedia page, without an article of her own. For some reason that made him shake with rage, although rationally he knows that  _most_ people don't have a Wikipedia page, that he only has one because his circumstances are unusual to the point of weird. Freaks of science get Wikipedia pages. Their sisters don't. 

She was married. She had children. He has a niece and nephew out there somewhere, probably with kids of their own. It gives him a strange sort of vertigo to think about it. He knows that he lost seventy years. Hydra rewrote those decades in blood. But looking at Rebecca's life makes him feel every year that was stolen from him. Did she love her husband? Was she proud of her children? He should know those things. He should have been able to watch his niece's face change from baby roundness to the angles of adulthood, should have been able to listen to his nephew's fumbling first attempts to read. He would have lent him paperbacks, the dime novels with rocket ships he'd always loved. He thinks about finding his sister's children, but what would he say? Here's one of your mother's ghosts, come back from the grave coated in blood and younger than you. Aren't you glad to see me? 

Rebecca died in 1998. He'd been busy destabilizing Kazakhstan, he's pretty sure. If he starts thinking about how unfair it all is, he'll start screaming and never stop, so instead he thinks about raisin bread, and the drawings he and Becca used to make together, telling stories about the drawings, each trying to outdo each other in new levels of ridiculousness. He wasn't an artist like Steve, but he could spin a yarn to make his sister laugh. He loved her laugh.  

After he writes, he wanders the city. He leaves at different times and he never goes the same way. His hair is getting long again, long enough to pull into a tail. He wears hats, baseball caps and knitted watch caps. Sometimes he wears glasses with useless lenses. He has two coats, a heavy one and a light one. He takes his backpack with him. Sometimes he sits and draws or writes. Sometimes he takes pictures with his phone, never with people in them; he has an album full of images, landmarks or streets or flowers, that he chose, that he can look at any time he wants. 

He sets a timer on his phone. His body is good at many things, but not so much at letting him know that it's hungry. He needs to eat a lot to maintain the machine they made of him. He's teaching himself to cook, like a God Damn Adult. He doesn't remember much from before, but that's okay. The whole internet is there to help him. The first meal he made for himself was nothing fancy, just baked chicken and vegetables. But it had been  _his_ , made by his hands to feed his body, and it had been fucking delicious.

The internet has some suggestions about working out, too. He thinks his muscles will just maintain themselves without any effort on his part--he wasn't doing calisthenics in between trips to the cryotube--but there's a pleasure in pushing himself, in seeing just how many pushups or squats he can do before he feels any strain. It settles him in his body. It is his, part of him, not anyone else's tool to use. 

He is reading a newspaper in a cafe. He has eaten a cheese pastry and is licking crumbs off of his fingertips. His cappuccino is thick with foam. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and cold and if anyone asked him, he would say that he is content. A content human person. He turns the page, leaving a buttery fingerprint, and freezes. ONE YEAR AFTER INSIGHT is blazed across the top of the section. There are several articles. One of them is about Steve. There's a picture of him, black and white and grainy. Barnes licks his finger clean and touches it lightly. His pulse thumps in his wrist as he traces the line of Steve's cheekbone, his crooked nose. He doesn't read the articles. He folds the paper carefully and puts it in his backpack. Once he's home, he'll cut the picture out and put it in his notebook.  He likes to look at Steve. 

It's been a year. A year since he was reborn in fire and blood and the water of the Potomac. A year since he chose not to kill Steve, the first choice he made in his new life. He has so many choices now. That is something he has given to himself. He closes his eyes against a wave of longing, almost dizzy with it. For what, he doesn't know. Someone to tell this to? He has his notebooks for that. He didn't remember his actual birthday. When he looked up Rebecca, he'd seen it--March 10th--and noted with something like humor that it had only been a few weeks before. But this--this is the anniversary of his decision to be human again.

"Happy birthday to me," he whispers. 

*

He doesn't have his tattoo sketchbook with him--it's back at the apartment--but that's okay. What he wants isn't fancy at all. Something small, to make the occasion of his rebirth. One of these days he's going to get a really fucking big tattoo, but he's taking his time deciding what that will be and where he's going to put it. It's good to take his time, to ponder over it. It's important. 

The first shop he stops in doesn't have any women artists working, so he nopes out of there and keeps walking. He's feeling a lot more together now than he was in Atlanta, but there are some limits it's best not to test--at least, not in public. Not with fragile squishy civilians around. 

The second shop he stops in has a woman working who's almost as tall as he is, though much, much skinnier. She has a truly impressive fall of dreadlocks spilling down her back, some of them with bright beads or threads wrapped around them. A complex geometric shape on her shoulder peeks out from under her sleeve, edged with white that stands out against her dark skin. He wonders how something like that would look against his own paler hue. 

"The skin is very sensitive on the inside of your wrist," she says after he explains what he wants: one tiny star. One star, for one year of trying to put himself back together. One year of trying to be more than a weapon. He didn't choose to be marked with the first one, the one on his shoulder, but it's not such a terrible thing: the star is for Steve, too. "It'll hurt pretty bad." 

He shrugs. Pretty bad is relative when you can remember being stabbed to see how fast you'd heal. "That's okay."

It doesn't take long. She shows him several designs, five pointed, six pointed, eight pointed. Blocky, shaded, delicate. So many choices, and he thinks: maybe next year, and is startled at the thought of his own future. It brings a feeling like champagne bubbles, bright and fizzing. Maybe he'll get enough years of being a person that he'll have a whole damn constellation up his arm. 

But this is year one, so he chooses a simple five-pointed star in solid black, no bigger than a pencil eraser, in the center of his right wrist where the blue veins hide beneath his skin. There's no scar there to layer over. 

It's a different kind of pain than the last tattoo. He feels it deeper somehow, perhaps because it's so close to the bone. But it's not so bad, and it takes hardly any time at all to finish. 

"There you go," she says, and walks him through the now-familiar steps of aftercare, telling him to be especially careful because the skin is thin and next to his wrist joint. He listens attentively, smiling at his wrist through the cling film. A whole year, god damn. It feels like an accomplishment. 

He is feeling good, so he decides to tackle the item on his list that gives him the most difficulty: Talk to People Without Scaring Them. Cooking is just making things, and books don't mind when he can't find words or has to sit and shake for a while. People are different. He talked to the tattoo artist, but that was transactional. It doesn't count. 

He stops at a cafe and orders green tea. The drink is pale and smells floral. It's nice out and the tables are crowded. He picks one at random. 

"Excuse me, may I sit here?" 

The young woman looks up from her tablet, assessing. Barnes does not actually try to smile at her, because he's not certain he has a handle on that. It can slide all too easily into creepy territory. But he does his best to keep a neutral, open expression on his face, and it must work, because she waves him to a seat. She bends back over her tablet, and after a moment, Barnes gets his book out of his backpack. He's not going to interrupt her just to talk; that would defeat the whole point of having a pleasant interaction. 

He takes a sip of his tea. It tastes like grass and flowers. He likes it. It's subtle. 

He likes this story. How did the author make rabbits so compelling? But they are. He sinks back into the story with Fiver and Bigwig, so quickly and so deeply it takes him a second to process that the woman is speaking to him. 

"Your book is good?" she is asking him. 

"Very." He lowers the book a little to indicate that he doesn't mind stopping to talk. He will not tell her that he had to take a break from it when his eyes watered  reading about Blackavar. "I didn't expect to enjoy it so much." 

"Are you visiting the city?" Perhaps she has no interest in books about rabbits. Maybe he looks like a tourist with his backpack. It's fine; he is a visitor here, even though he has his little flat. He can't stay in one place forever. 

"Yes. It's lovely." 

"Mmm." She meets his eye and smiles. She has brown eyes and the corners crinkle up when she smiles. It's a nice smile. He wishes he had one to offer back. "I'm afraid I have a meeting to get to," she says, powering down her tablet. "But if you'd like to get together another time..." She presses a card into his hand and lets her fingers trail across his palm. His eyes have widened in surprise, and that makes her smile more broadly for some reason. She stands up in a whirl of some perfume and walks away, a little bit of a saunter in her step. 

Barnes is in no way ready to cross this item off his list--he knows he needs much more practice--but. That went..surprisingly well? Or possibly he simply picked someone to sit next to who has a thing for murder eyes. Because that was a thing, right? She gave him her number because she found him attractive. He flips the card between his fingers, considering. He will never call her, but it is meant to be flattering, isn't it? 

He hasn't considered sex much since he came back to himself. It is far too much of an intimacy when he has a difficult time holding a conversation. Since he started eating more regularly, he has woken up erect a few times, but his general approach to the issue has been to ignore it until it goes away. 

He thinks this was something that Bucky was good at. Not just sex, but flirting. Interacting. Drawing people in. Is it something he could become good at? Maybe. But the image that comes to mind is not the woman with her brown eyes, but Steve. 

Is that..did they do that? No. Not that he remembers. He vaguely recalls dancing and laughing with women, his mouth entwined with someone else's, her arms soft beneath his hands, the taste of beer. He'd know if he had done that with Steve, wouldn't he? If Hydra stole the memory of kissing Steve, he's going to...he doesn't know. It's no fun to threaten a murder spree, even mentally, when he knows he's actually done it in the past. 

He remembers touching Steve. He remembers slinging his arm over Steve's shoulder, hugging him, bumping into him deliberately and accidentally-on-purpose, sleeping in the same god damn bed. When he thinks back to that easy physicality, he wants to shake himself for taking it for granted. The only easy way for him to touch these days is if he's hurting someone, and that's not what he wants.  

He finishes his tea and starts walking back toward his apartment, trying to dig into his memories. Is this new, this feeling for Steve, this want? Not new today--he's put it into words, but the feeling has been there for a long time. He glances at his new tattoo and snorts softly to himself. A long part of this one year that he has had as himself. He means new to Barnes, not a feeling from Bucky. 

He's not certain. Bucky's feelings for Steve were so big, it's almost hard to imagine that they weren't all-encompassing, bodies coming together as surely as hearts and minds. He kicks a loose paving stone as he walks by. But it was different then, he knows that much, less acceptable. A memory flashes: a bigger boy shoving Steve, muttering  _fairy_ , Steve with a split lip later, Bucky holding ice to it for him. Maybe Bucky never told Steve, and pushed all those feelings down since he wasn't supposed to have them. Maybe he  _did_ tell Steve, and Barnes just doesn't remember. Maybe Steve let him down easy. 

This is not a productive line of thought. Work on getting to where you can talk to him in person without needling a lie down afterwards, then worry about your pants feelings, Barnes. 

When he comes home, he throws himself down on the ratty mattress and stretches out toward the walls, letting himself feel the contact along his body, the working of muscle over bone as he stretches. In a minute, he's going to get up and start making dinner, but...not yet. There's something big and strange in his chest, under his skin, like he did more today than walk around and get a tattoo. 

He pulls the plastic away, and smooths the ointment into the skin, metal fingers gentle with himself. It barely hurts when he touches it, and the redness and swelling are already almost gone. Such a little scar, but the satisfaction he feels when he looks at it is enormous: an entire year of self determination. 

He wiggles his phone out of his pocket and snaps a picture, the black lines crisp and a little shiny with ointment. 

He doesn't let himself think about it. He pops up a text box and inputs the number he's only used once but has had memorized ever since, just in case. It'll show up as coming from a blocked number, and it's going to bounce through so many control channels even Romanoff won't be able to trace it back. But he's convinced that Steve won't ask her. Somehow Barnes thinks Steve's going to keep this message to himself. 

He presses send. 

All in all, it's been a good day.   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Missed in History podcast has a fun episode about [the Defenestrations of Prague.](https://www.missedinhistory.com/podcasts/the-defenestrations-of-prague.htm) Historically, Praguians have a fine tradition of throwing people out of windows. 
> 
> Barnes is reading [Watership Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down) by Richard Adams. Blackavar is a rabbit in a warren run by the tyrannical General Woundwort. He is badly injured and permanently scarred as an example to the other rabbits after an escape attempt and then proves to be loyal and a good fighter when he falls in with the good rabbits. Not that there are any parallels to be drawn or anything. 
> 
> Content notes: Barnes remembers someone calling Steve a homophobic slur as a kid. He also remembers being tortured, but it's not explicit & he's pretty flippant about it.


	10. (It's a Godawful Small Affair)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes sees the action in Sokovia on tv. If Steve is going to throw himself into action, Barnes wishes he could have his back.   
> \---  
> His cover isn't that deep; when a ripple of excitement brushes the edges of the crowd, he snaps to attention like a hunting dog. He doesn't move from his lazy sprawl, but his awareness is on point, tracking the source of the disturbance. In one of the bars, the television has been turned from a sporting event to a news story, and people are clustered around it. More televisions are changing over and people are drifting towards them, others bent over their phones.   
>  ---  
> (See the end notes for content notes.)

Springtime is coming to Prague. Tree branches are dotted with tiny purple buds and the air feels lighter. Cleaner. Barnes has not had to wrestle too hard with the spaghetti tangle of his brain for the last few weeks. He thinks every iteration of himself has liked the spring. He has memories that are more sensory impressions; sitting on a rooftop, on a fire escape, the metal cool against his legs, the sun warm on his skin, but the breeze still carrying a hint of winter along with the scent of fish and garbage. In those, Steve is often a presence beside him, leaning into him or not quite close enough to touch. 

There are other memories. Being surprised by flowers on a mission when last he had been out in snow. A light wind fragrant with daffodils stirring the Asset's hair as he watched a door through a scope, unable to move on the mission, enjoying the sensation anyway. The shutter-stop of seasons or years, time experienced as a scattershot of points rather than a smooth line. 

And now here: the line resuming, from one spring to the next, past to present; hope for the future.

This is a good feeling, and Barnes leans into it. He should know by now that good things rarely last. 

He is sitting in the sunshine. The Old Town Square is always packed full of people in pleasant weather. In an enclosed space, he would have difficulty functioning, but in the open air, it's acceptable. Part of his cover, even; one person like all the others, performing humanity without a thought to the performance, cupping a mug of tea in his flesh hand, leaning back with his metal elbow propped against the step behind him. 

But his cover isn't that deep; when a ripple of excitement brushes the edges of the crowd, he snaps to attention like a hunting dog. He doesn't move from his lazy sprawl, but his awareness is on point, tracking the source of the disturbance. In one of the bars, the television has been turned from a sporting event to a news story, and people are clustered around it. More televisions are changing over and people are drifting towards them, others bent over their phones. 

Barnes follows one of the knots of people to a television. Something bad is happening somewhere. A city is floating in the air. Why. A flash of memory strikes: the Stark Expo, 1943. Howard Stark's flying car. But this is different. This is not progress. This is attack. There are robots, glinting as they soar above the city, above the yawning crater beneath it. There is shaky video from someone's camera phone: a giant green figure shoving across the screen, and Barnes's throat feels like a fist is clenching around it. 

If the Hulk is there, the Avengers are there--

Another bystander video, a flash of red, white, and blue, the star like a target on his chest.  _Goddammit, Steve_. Heat splashes across his flesh hand; he spilled his tea. 

His body is tensed for action he cannot take. He is in Prague; Steve is in Sokovia. Part of his mind is calculating timetables, weapons retrieval, plans of attack, but whatever is happening will be over by the time he gets there, one way or another. His breath is coming faster, stuttering like those points of memory. The plates in his metal arm ripple and resettle, and it's a good thing no one is looking at him because it is pretty weird to see them shift beneath his shirtsleeve. He has to get out of this fucking crowd before he hurts someone.

He walks quickly back to his apartment. He needs intelligence. The not-knowing is as bad as the helplessness. He should have Steve's back. He feels  _that_ is what he was made for in any time. If he has to be a weapon, let it be in Steve's service. 

Only, he is so weary of blood. 

Back in his apartment he fires up his computer, tapping his metal fingers together as it boots up. Click click click click click. He makes himself stop. His breathing is still not optimal, too fast and too shallow, and his heart rate is accelerated far more than a brisk walk should account for. His muscles are coiled to spring, but there is nothing he can do. 

He is thankful for twenty-four hour news channels, at least. It isn't ideal, not like being there himself or a mission report would be, but it is so much better than nothing. He splits his computer screen into three channels and searches social media for bystander reports. There's a lot of confusion and misinformation, but that's to be expected. He sorts through it. No one knows the why or who of it yet, but he can trace the fighting. He can trace Steve's path, sort of. 

God bless civilians and their inexplicable need to document every damn thing and immediately put it online. There's video of Steve loading people into some kind of flying bus, and even while his heart is still marching double time with worry, he finds himself grinning with pride and frustration and recognition: yep, that's Stevie, all right. Making sure everyone else is safe beside his own self.

Then the fucking city falls out of the fucking sky. 

Barnes is standing without the memory of getting up, the plates in his arm a constant whir. The taste of iron floods his mouth, a tiny flash of pain where he has bitten the inside of his cheek. Did Steve get on the flying bus. Is he still in the city, falling. Barnes knows what it is like to fall. In a way, it is the first memory of his present self. Steve should never experience that terrible rebirth.

Steve should not die, either. And selfishly: not before Barnes can get back to him.

He sits down again, clutching his hands together so tightly his flesh fingers ache. He can't get enough air. There is some kind of electrical field wrapping the city and then it...explodes. Chunks of stone and metal and cement rain down into the crater the city came from. Even Steve is unlikely to have survived this. Please, Steve, please have gotten on the flying bus. 

He doesn't know how much time passes before he sees Steve again. The news channels show the city exploding over and over, but that tells him nothing he doesn't already know. Then they cut to shaken civilians coming off the buses and there he is, a tiny figure in red white and blue, cowl off, golden hair visibly rumpled even from a distance. 

The feeling that shoves Barnes back is so vast he can't be sure if it's even relief. It presses into him like a giant hand pinning him to the floor, where he sprawls, drawing in his first real breath since he fled from the square. Steve is alive. Once again, Steve has jumped headfirst into a fight but managed to not get himself killed. 

His body is still shaking, trying to shed adrenaline. He forces himself to sit back up, to return to the news channels. The danger might not be over yet. 

But that seems to be the end of the theatrics, for now. At least with regard to Steve. Over the next couple of days, the news slowly reveals that an AI Tony Stark created went rogue. Perhaps it is because Stark built the thing that everyone seems to want to blame the Avengers for the destruction, although they were manifestly working to stop it and prevent further loss of life. There is talk of necessary oversight. How exactly would that be accomplished? And are they to just stop and wait for action to be authorized if aliens attack the earth again? Steve is not going to let people die when he can stop it. Barnes is certain of that. 

For several days it is difficult to leave the apartment. The sun is no less warm, the breeze no less refreshing, and yet he is unable to appreciate them as he did before. It's not the temperature or the flowers which have changed, but him. He has been foolish enough to think that the world leaves space for happiness. He remembers that he felt it, but the feeling is as distant and fleeting as trying to grasp a cloud in his fingers. 

Steve is alive, despite Barnes's not being there to do the one thing he knows he is good at: watching Rogers's six. That is a reminder that not everything ends in tragedy; or at least, not yet. 

It is also a reminder that Steve has other people to guard his back. He doesn't need Barnes for his one purpose, and what he wants Barnes for, Barnes is ineffectual at. He will never be the Bucky that Steve remembers. That person died in the cold seventy years ago. That man he is now grew from the soil left in that man's grave. If he could wipe himself again and leave only the Bucky that was, he doesn't know that he could do it, not even for Steve. That person wouldn't know about earbuds to prevent Hydra fucks from wiping him or remember tea in the square in Prague. That person would not have chosen these tattoos.

He has been aiming himself at Steve. To be with him is Barnes's endgame, in whatever normal person configuration he can shape himself into. But he worries that it won't be enough, and now he knows, viscerally, that Steve doesn't need him.

*

The third day after Steve doesn't die, Barnes realizes he stinks and he needs to get his ass up off the mattress. The news has stopped talking about Sokovia twenty-four/seven. He cannot claim to be gathering intel anymore.

"Get your shit together, Barnes." The sound of his own voice startles him. Good; he has been spiraling downward.

He is alive; Steve is alive; it's more than the world had wanted to give them, sometimes. Perhaps more than most, he is aware of how little control he actually has over the course of his life, but he can control this: he can continue to choose to be a person. He can review the items on his list. It's not like he can decide to be a better human and there, all the work's done, but he can choose to take the steps to get there, and he can choose not to give himself grief over what he can't control.

It's been three days since he cooked a damn meal. He's been shoving protein bars down his gullet when and if he noticed the phone alarms. Okay. That wasn't great, but it had been what he could manage.

But now he is choosing to lever himself off the floor. He is choosing to take a shower and put on clean clothes. He assesses his kitchen, decides he needs to get groceries before he can feed himself like a normal person.

Barnes takes a breath, jams a hat over his wet hair, and puts his earbuds in. He opens the door, and puts himself back into the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Barnes has a hitch in his recovery after he worries that Steve is dead and is unable to take care of himself or leave his apartment for a couple of days.


	11. (Time Isn't Holding Up)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve's not in Brooklyn anymore. He's at Avengers Tower now with all his superhero buddies. Ugh, Manhattan. But the ship came into Brooklyn, and Barnes takes the opportunity to walk through it. So much has changed, but then he'll see a building he remembers, the bones still there even if all of the details are different.

Barnes gives his apartment one last look. It isn't much, but for a time, it was his, and he's grateful for it. All he has now is his duffel bag full of weaponry, a few changes of clothes, his backpack with his notebooks and various papers, and a burning desire to get to New York to see Steve.  

This is stupid; he knows it. He knows that Steve came through Sokovia more or less unscathed. He wasn't even seriously injured. Barnes still wants to see him with his own two eyes. There is no rational excuse that he can make for this, no logic he can twist to make this a sensible action. He just wants to see Steve, is all; there's an ache in the middle of his chest that won't ease until he does. 

Returning to the States is probably counter-productive in terms of staying below the radar, and New York maybe the dumbest place he could go besides DC, but he's not letting that stop him. He takes the train to Brussels, stashes his duffel bag in a train station locker, and gets on a ship to New York.  

*

Steve's not in Brooklyn anymore. He's at Avengers Tower now with all his superhero buddies. Ugh, Manhattan. But the ship came into Brooklyn, and Barnes takes the opportunity to walk through it. So much has changed, but then he'll see a building he remembers, the bones still there even if all of the details are different.

Barnes takes a cab to Prospect Park. This is one place that hasn't changed, not that much. He exactly can't pretend that it's the same as it was in his memory--the smells are wrong, the sounds are wrong, it won't ever be right in that way again; that window slammed shut for him in 1945. But maybe it wouldn't have felt right even if he'd finished his tour and come home. Sergeant Barnes had changed so much that it might have fit him as badly as his uniform toward the end, with the weight he'd dropped despite constantly eating. So no, it's not like he remembers, but it's close enough that he can close his eyes and feel that if he's not in place, at least he's not out of it.

He wonders if any place will ever feel like home again.

He buys a hot dog and a coffee off a guy in a stall, and strolls around a little. Here and there are rows of brownstones that if he squints are almost like what he remembers. He's torn between smiling and swallowing the lump in his throat. He can almost pretend that he can turn around and Stevie will be there, short and wheezy and nobody better, and Bucky Barnes with his arm slung over his shoulder, leaning down to talk into his good ear.

He wads up the paper from his hot dog and tosses it into a trash can. That's past now. No sense wanting back what's gone forever. Of course, when has sense ever had anything to do with it?

Time to get to Manhattan.

*

And then some things have hardly changed at all. He stops for a few seconds just to look up at the ceiling of Grand Central Station, people shooting him dirty looks.

Once he steps outside, the illusion is broken. Rising above Grand Central Station is Avengers Tower, rising up like a monument to ego--Tony Stark's ego, specifically. The metal plates in his arm shift and whir beneath his jacket. Well, that's where Steve is, in theory.

He gets a hotel less than half a mile from Grand Central Station. A couple of nights cost more than a month of his place in Prague, but that's Manhattan. It's also significantly more comfortable than his place in Prague. He tells himself that _tourist_ is his cover for the next little while.

There's a little coffee place across the street from the main entrance to the tower. Barnes gets comfortable and settles in to watch the flow of traffic in and out of the tower. Does he really think he'll just stumble across Steve? No. But he can get an idea of how many people wander in and out, and at what times, and that will inform the direction of his surveillance.

He pulls out his notebook and writes _Eyes_ across the top of a page in Russian. Over the next hour, he sips an overpriced and over-sugary coffee drink and jots down notes about traffic patterns. There could well be a separate entrance for residents, even apart from the parking garage, which is already on his list to look up. He jots down a list of all the things he'll need to investigate. It's soothing. He doesn't remember the last time he planned a mission--well, of course he doesn't. Hydra planned his missions and sent him off to do them. Steve probably plans his now. The Avengers are fools if they don't take advantage of his tactics.

He chews on his pen and leans back. He and Steve planned missions together. He just remembered. The brass handed down the objective, generally, and he and Steve put the plan together, then got everybody else's input, because they were fucking well aware of their limitations. Everybody else in this case meant the Howling Commandos. He remembers them, a little. Not as much as he remembers Steve. He doesn't remember anyone as much as he remembers Steve.

This is not helpful to his current mission. He wonders if it is possible to find blueprints of the tower online, or possibly somewhere in Stark's tower intranet. It would be far more difficult to extract them--Stark's security is renowned, digital as well as physical. He scribbles down a few more coded notes.

The small hairs at the nape of his neck are convinced someone is watching him. He continues writing, but now it's just gibberish. He scans the shop from under the brim of his ball cap. There are the same two baristas who were here when he came in, two older men playing checkers, a table of what he suspects are college students, and three men in suits standing in line at the counter. None of them move like surveillance, but he trusts his gut. Also, there could be cameras. He doesn't doubt Hydra would like to get their hands on him again. Take him out for a spin, kick the tires. Sweet coffee bile fills his throat and he pops his earbuds in and starts a playlist. He doesn't even know what it is, only that it's loud.

That's not happening. He slides his notebook into his backpack and heads out the door, ducking his head under probable locations of security cameras as he goes. It's second nature. Rather than walk directly toward his hotel, Barnes turns down the nearest street, away from Avengers Tower. The earbuds are necessary in case of Hydra, but they fucking well compromise his situational awareness. He's hardly gone half a block when someone falls into step beside him.

He slides back, putting some distance between himself and the Widow. She shoots him a sly little smile and points at her ear. Barnes sighs and pulls out his earbuds. He is a little surprised to realize he actually trusts her not to use any of the codes if she knows them. He'd love to know how she found him so quickly, but he won't give her the satisfaction of asking.

"What do you want?" he asks.

"That's my line." She's wearing jeans and a striped t-shirt and garish oversized sunglasses, and just because he can only spot two knives and one gun doesn't mean that's all she has. Her hair is lighter than it was in Nice, glossy and straight and bobbed at her chin.

He weighs his options and decides there's nothing to be lost by telling her the truth. "Saw you on the news in Sokovia. I needed to…" But he can't finish, can't tell her that even though he knows Steve is uninjured, he has to see him to convince himself.

Her eyes sharpen. He has the feeling she knows what he isn't saying. But she doesn't press. "Did you finish your project?"

"Close as I'm going to get for now." There are still a few Hydra bases out there with chairs, he's certain of it. But there are some he doesn't have the intel to take care of, and some he doesn't have the resources. He wouldn't mind dying taking out those kind of bases, not too much, but any time he's going after a chair, he's putting himself close to his worst nightmare. If they have the chair, they could take him again, wipe away the precarious hold on himself he's wrestled out of the past year. Besides, he'd decided to try living without fighting unless he had to. He thinks it's helped; he thinks he's more of a person than when she saw him last.

She nods, a precise movement of her chin, raises an eyebrow in a question, and starts walking. After a moment of hesitation, he falls in step with her. He doesn't think she's hostile to him at the moment, and here is a much greater source of intelligence on Steve than anything else he has access to. She looks ahead, but her attention is on him, assessing. "Are you working on another project now?"

"Yeah," he says, though not like she means. The project is himself.

"Must be pretty quiet," she says. "I haven't heard any buzz at all."

"No," he says. "You wouldn't have."

"Did you ever decide what your intentions are?" Now she looks at him, tilting her head. He can't tell what her eyes are doing behind the sunglasses, but it doesn't matter. He'd only see what she wanted him to anyway. "Towards our mutual friend."

"That's between me and him."

She pulls him into a narrow arcade between buildings and stops short. There's a dumpster, several puddles of unidentified liquid, a miasma of unfortunate smells, and no cameras that he can see. Good place for a chat, he supposes. She shoves her ugly sunglasses up on her forehead so she can look him in the eye, for whatever good that'll do either of them. Her irises are green. "It can't be between you if you're going to hurt him again."

He can't help himself; he winces. "I'm not going to hurt him. I don't want to."

She scans his face. "I believe you. Did you want to hurt him before?"

And there it is: he could dodge or deflect any weapon she attacked him with, but not this. "No." He remembers the flash of memory from Nice: sun on a gun barrel, the taste of dust. "What I did to you. I didn't want to do that either."

She shrugs that off. "I'm less worried about me than I am about him. You come after me, I'll stop you. He won't even try."

Barnes's heart is stuttering almost as badly as his breathing. He counts silently, trying to get himself under control. She watches, doubtless cataloging every reaction, calculating the degree to which he does not have his shit together. "I don't want that," he croaks when he catches his breath.

She doesn't try to touch him, but she leans a little closer. "You could still come in with me. I wasn't lying before. I can help you."

"Why would you do that? If you think I'm…" But that's another sentence he can't finish. Dangerous? He is, manifestly. A threat to Steve? That's the last thing he wants, but he's not carrying around these earbuds for fun alone. He can't promise the finger on his triggers is always his own. God, he wishes he could.

"Somebody took a chance on me." She shrugs with one shoulder. "It's not exactly that I'm paying it forward--it doesn't really come up as often as you'd think--but there's probably not that many other people out there who understand what you're trying to do." 

"What am I trying to do?" he says warily. 

"Build a person from the ground up," she says. "Rebuild, in your case." 

He thinks about what he knows about the Red Room and the Black Widow program. He doesn't know if it would be easier to make a person from nothing or from these fragments that are all he has left, knowing he will never be the person they came from. No matter how he cobbles himself together, he is bound to be a disappointment to the one person who remembers him. "That's my project now," he says against his better judgment. "Building a person. Not sure there's enough left to rebuild." 

She rocks back on her heels, letting him see that she's thinking. Probably she didn't expect this conversation to go this way; he knows he didn't intend to be that honest. 

"Tell me what you came here to do," she says finally. 

He meets her eyes and shrugs. "I didn't come here to do anything. I just...he could've died. I wouldn't have seen him again." 

The garbage stinks and he's sweating under his jacket, both because it's fucking June and because he's had about a dozen more emotional reactions than planned in the last ten minutes. Romanoff stares at him, then flips her sunglasses back down onto her nose. 

"All right, soldier. You want to see him? Let's see him." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 10/24: I just went back to double check something and noticed that a section of this chapter got cut off when I uploaded it the first time. WHOOPS. The first section is what was missing before, and I apologize for the very abrupt transition from Prague to NY. >_< Hopefully this helps!


	12. (Time Isn't After Us)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes and Natasha have a chat.  
> Content Note: More explicit violence than usual.  
> _____  
> "If you change your mind, call me." She turns and walks off, giving him her back with blithe unconcern, like he's an ally. Like she really believes in the person he hopes he is becoming. More of her paying it forward, he supposes; or maybe she too is trusting her gut. 

 

"I don't understand why you're doing this," Barnes says. What's more puzzling is that he doesn't understand why _he's_ doing it. Obviously, he wants to see Steve, and this is the most direct means of achieving his objective. But he doesn't think he could have accepted the Widow's offer even six months ago. He still doesn't know what she's getting out of it.

"I told you--I've been where you are, at least a little. It gets better." They're walking at a leisurely pace. Romanoff is in no rush, apparently. Not that Barnes expected her to produce Steve immediately, but they're not walking toward the tower. He doesn't think she's going to attack him, or even significantly mislead him. Whatever part of him that's sure she wouldn't use the codes is sure about this too. "Part of coming to terms with all of it is learning to accept help from other people." He catches the movement of her eyes beneath the sunglasses as she glances at him. "It's still not easy for me."

He mulls this over. This hasn't been something on his list. It is difficult enough for him to speak to people when there's no end goal. Most of his interactions are transactional. He prefers it; there is no question of lingering debt. "You'll help me with this because you understand my situation," he says, just to be clear.

"And because Steve is my friend, and you're his friend." She shoots him another look. "How do you want to play this? Face-to-face?"

"No," he says immediately. The point here is for him to see Steve, not Steve to see him.

"You sure? It'd make his year."

"I can't." He tries to make himself breathe calmly. "You said I'm his friend. But. That person died a long time ago. I'm just…what's left."

She stops walking. She puts her hand on his flesh arm and pulls him out of the middle of the sidewalk, to the accompaniment of pedestrian glares. He is so surprised at the touch, he allows it. She lets go as soon as they are leaned up against a brick wall and pops her glasses up again so she can scan his face. "Do you think that matters to him?"

"How could it not?" His mouth is dry. "He's expecting his friend, not…this."

"I don't think you're giving him or yourself enough credit. You're not the same as you were, but he's not who you remember either. Would you reject him because he's not Captain Rogers from 1944 anymore?"

Barnes can feel the blankness of his own face. "He's still Steve," he tells her. "Nobody burned it out of him."

She rolls her eyes. "It's up to you. But if you asked me, I'd say meet him. There's not going to be anyone else on your side the way he is."

Barnes feels like a plant left in the sun for too long, withered and sere, that's just been hit with an entire garden hose worth of water. _Nobody else on your side the way he_ is are words he will pull out to examine from all sides, and polish to jewel-brightness.

The answer's still no, though.

"I can't," he says. "Got to finish putting myself back together first."

Her eyes narrow as she pounces. "But that's the long-term plan? Put yourself to rights, then get the band back together?"

Barnes presses his right hand against the brick, hard enough to feel the scratch of it against his fingertips. "That's my plan. I don't know what he wants."

"Oh, he wants. Trust me on this one." She pushes herself off the wall. "Okay. You want to see him without him seeing you. We can make that happen. But first of all--is there anything you need? Money? Weapons?" She hesitates. "A way to get in touch if you need it?"

"I've got Steve's phone number."

"I meant with me." She starts walking. "If you want a more indirect way of keeping tabs."

He walks next to her, pulse finally settling. He's got plenty of money and arms--at least in Europe--and he wouldn't be able to be sure that she hadn't included some kind of tracker in any weapon she gave him. "I'm good on supplies. But, yeah. I'd like a way to get you if I needed."

She smiled and rattles off a phone number. He puts it into his phone under Marja Morevna.

"Okay," she says, hands in her pockets. "Text me."

He does. She texts him back an address. 

"There's a charity event tonight at eight. Steve'll be there. I'll get him to the rooftop bar so you can look to your heart's content."

He'll be watching, but he already knows that his heart will not be content no matter how long he looks. Still, this is a kindness she is doing him. "Thank you," he says.

"If you change your mind, call me." She turns and walks off, giving him her back with blithe unconcern, like he's an ally. Like she really believes in the person he hopes he is becoming. More of her paying it forward, he supposes; or maybe she too is trusting her gut.

*

Barnes is set up well before eight on the roof of a neighboring building. He watches through his scope as restaurant workers set up the tables and bars, as security moves in and establishes a pattern. They look…surprisingly competent. He reluctantly approves.

Then it is only waiting. He knows this stillness. Looking for Steve through a scope is familiar. He has done it many times. It's easy to settle into it and let the feeling part of his brain go silent as he calculates trajectories, adjusts for wind.

And then finally guests start trickling in. He watches them mingle, drinks and snacks in hand. Distantly, he wonders what exactly this event is raising money for, but it doesn't really matter. A blonde woman he thinks he's seen before takes the stage and talks. At this distance, even his hearing doesn't pick up what she says.

Then Steve takes the stage. He has to adjust the microphone; he is significantly taller than the woman. He is wearing a very nice suit. Barnes drives his teeth into his lower lip. Neither he nor Steve had ever been able to afford a suit like that before the war, and certainly not during. They'd had second-hand suits in the thirties, badly fitted despite his ma's instructions about alterations. Neither of them had been that great with a needle. Steve looks really good. He does not look like someone who had a city fall on him a couple weeks back. He does not look like someone who fits into shitty apartments in Prague, either. Barnes is suddenly deeply aware of how ill-fitting he would be in Steve's life now. Two pieces from different puzzles, unable to mesh together. The sense of displacement he felt in Prospect Park hits him like a physical blow: there is no going back to the time when he and Steve made sense together. He sucks in a breath and fits his eye to the scope, blinking away the moisture on his lashes.

Steve is talking. Barnes wishes he could hear. He amuses himself trying to think of what charity Steve and the blonde woman are supporting. Wheezy children, perhaps. Or there could be whales in need of saving. The Home for Wayward Ex-Assassins is probably in need of funds.

Steve talks for about fifteen minutes, and then applause ripples through the place, visible if not audible at this distance. Someone else comes up to the stage; it looks like there are items to be auctioned off. Romanoff slinks over to Steve, wearing a green dress that pools around her legs. Barnes approves. The dress is aesthetically pleasing, but more importantly, she could have a rocket launcher under that skirt and no one would know.

Steve leans down to talk into her ear. She gestures toward the rooftop bar. They walk outside, into the crosshairs of Barnes's scope. Romanoff is looking out for Barnes; she turns and maneuvers and Steve follows, until she has him under the brightest light. She leans back on her elbows and looks directly at Barnes's aerie.

Well, fuck it. He texts her a raised middle finger. She checks her phone and laughs. Steve bends down to tell her something, and she angles him toward Barnes.

Barnes has the strangest memory. It settles on him like a fishbowl; what's happening now, but backwards and upside down, looking through very thick glass. He…Steve was watching him. Small Steve, angry Steve, on the edge of the dance hall. Barnes--no. Bucky was the one with a beautiful redhead, Steve watching from far away. But Bucky had known he was watching. Bucky had been dancing with the girl, but for Steve. Well, how about that.

It's nice to know he was fucked up even before Hydra got their hands on him.

Steve now is a lot more relaxed. He's laughing at whatever Romanoff is telling him. Through the scope, Barnes can examine his face minutely, looking for signs of stress or pain. He doesn't see any. He talks to Romanoff about nothing much--Barnes lip reads a word here and there, enough to assure him that their conversation is innocuous. Steve is fine. Better than fine; he is good, he is doing meaningful things that do not involve blood. Barnes finds that he is envious.

And looking at Steve's face hollows his chest out, an ache that is pain but also sweetness. How can he be so lonely for one person?

Watching Steve through the scope is familiar, in way that brings the remembrance of cold, of the smell of pine trees. But this time, he doesn't have to look for threats. He can just look his fill. Romanoff keeps Steve out there for nearly a quarter of an hour before the blonde woman takes Steve back in to shake hands with the guests, and he is not full, but it's enough.

Romanoff leans against the railing like she's just looking into the night and mouths "Got what you needed?"

Barnes sends her a thumbs up emoji. Then he thinks about it and writes: _Thank you._

She checks her phone, smiles, and he lip-reads "you're welcome" in Russian.

He packs up his scope, puts in his earbuds, and when the staccato drums and electric guitar kick in, he makes his way down the building, flinging himself from rooftop to rooftop, slinging his arm around a fire escape, then letting go when it groans and shudders beneath his weight, clinging to a decorative element above a window before dropping to a lower level on the fire escape opposite. He avoids poking holes in the buildings with his metal arm; these are not Hydra bases he plans on exploding, after all. After sitting quietly on the roof with his emotions hanging out, the physical exertion feels good. It's fun to fling his body around when there's no threat. He trusts in his reflexes to keep him from splattering himself all over the pavement.

All in all, this has been a successful trip. He is--not settled, exactly, by seeing Steve, but reassured. Whether there is a place for him in Steve's life is still up in the air, but there is no question that Steve has made a place for himself. Barnes feels a little easier about any future Sokovian-style robot-fighting shenanigans. He believes Romanoff has Steve's back; a friend, she'd called him, and that was better than colleague or ally. Maybe Romanoff is right. Maybe he should talk to Steve. Steve is right there. And yes, Steve scares him, and he knows he is not like a normal person yet, but it's Steve. Steve could maybe handle his brand of not normal.

He can't resist walking by the restaurant one last time, looking up at the lighted room, hoping for one more glimpse of Steve. 

In retrospect, this is a mistake. 

Mooning after Steve affects his situational awareness, especially when his earbuds are in, to the point that he only notices his attacker when a hand falls on his shoulder. He whirls, ducking to sweep his leg underneath the man's knee. He staggers and falls back but there are two others. Barnes does not like the look of their guns; those are tranquilizers. He backs into the space between two buildings, because there's no one on the street right now, but that can't last very long. 

The first man starts talking, but Barnes is listening to a punk band covering an entire musical, so good luck getting a trigger word in over that, jackass. Barnes slides under his guard and punches him with his left hand. The man goes down. 

The other two are circling warily, and Barnes is abruptly enraged. He can't go anywhere without these assholes showing up; he can't have one god damn emotional epiphany without someone trying to sedate him or--does that guy have a syringe?--or steal his dna, or kidnap and brainwash him. 

Syringe guy he catches with a jab to the gut, which sends him staggering back but doesn't incapacitate him. The other asshole tries to bring the tranq gun to bear on him, but Barnes ducks and rolls into the guy's legs. He stumbles and Barnes takes the opportunity to snake up to his feet and secure the gun. He twists the man's arm around and the crack of it breaking reverberates. He feels it more than hears it, but the man's scream is unmistakable. He goes down, cradling his arm, and Barnes shoots him and the first man with the tranq gun, just for good measure. 

He whirls to face the man he'd gut-punched and fires the tranq gun instinctively, but it's empty. The guy draws a knife. Barnes's lips curl up into a snarl. The other man has made a grave error. Barnes does not have tactical gear the way the other man does, but he has spent decades honing his skill with a knife. He tosses the empty gun away and draws the knife at his hip, flipping it and settling the weight in his hand. (Also, because it's a little intimidating when your opponent can do that and not slice his fingers off.) 

The guy is good, and fast enough that maybe he's enhanced some way, but he's not Barnes. He strikes. Barnes blocks with his left hand, and simultaneously slashes with his right. The man stops the blow with his forearm, and Barnes tosses his knife over him and catches it with his left hand. He strikes from the left, and the man dances out of the way, but not quickly enough. Barnes can smell the blood where he scored his ribs. 

The guy feints, a flashy overhead attack to cover the knife he's pulled in his left hand, but Barnes sees what he's doing. He blocks, but the man strikes fast with his right hand, and muscle memory takes over. Without intending to, Barnes stops trying to get them both out of this fight. He attacks, and he hits his target. 

There's so much blood. The man's guts are spilling into the air through the gash in his abdomen, and his eyes are wide, his mouth an O. He looks betrayed. Barnes feels much the same way. 

He grabs the man's head with his left hand and immobilizes it so he can sever his spine at the base of his neck. He dies painlessly, almost instantly; the gut wound would have been slow and agonizing. The sound is even worse than the arm breaking. 

Barnes lets the body fall to the ground. He takes two steps back, turns to the wall, and vomits. He did not want to do this. This fucker didn't have to die today. He didn't have to make Barnes do it. 

He wipes his mouth on his shoulder. Then he wipes his hands on the corpse's tac gear, because his fingers are fucking covered in blood, again. He manages his dry heaves as he texts Marja Morevna: _Clean up needed outside. 3 of them. Might have been after me, might have been after our friend._ Because if there's one thing he knows, it's that every asshole who wanted their own supersoldier since 1943 has been after Steve's blood. 

Almost immediately: _Bodies?_  

He swallows. His thumb has left streaks on the screen of his phone. _One. Two unconscious. They can probably clarify who the target was._

 _Can you stay?_ He appreciates the specificity of her question. He would like to be able to stay, but at the moment, his skin is twitching with violence and despair. He hadn't consciously decided to kill, but the man is dead. Is there no escaping his programming?

 _No. Heading out._  He hesitates. _Thank you. I'll be in touch._

He pockets the phone, then jams his hands in his pockets. The drying blood is tacky. It's all too familiar. 

He stalks away, not looking at the building, at the lights up above. 

There's no way out of the shadows. Not for him.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter title and the previous one both come from "Once in a Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. 
> 
> [Marja Morevna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Koschei_the_Deathless) is a warrior queen from Russian folklore who defeated Koschei the deathless until her dumbass husband let him out. Ivan Bilibin illustrated her [beautifully.](https://i1.wp.com/folklorethursday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1.-Marja-Morevna-illustration_Ivan-Bilibin.jpg) (But he illustrates [everything](https://www.wikiart.org/en/ivan-bilibin) beautifully!) (Also, he was [hot?](https://uploads4.wikiart.org/images/ivan-bilibin.jpg!Portrait.jpg) I don't make the folklore illustrator rules.)
> 
> Barnes is listening to [Punk Side Story](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLARRMO7EiDwchzmcimRdc-0818CzGH4cs), by Schlong, a punk album that is solely a cover of West Wide Story, which, if you enjoy punk at all, or maybe even musicals at all, or join me in that part of the Venn diagram where they overlap, is well worth your time.


	13. Interludes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve and Natasha react to the attack.  
> *  
> The dead guy was extremely dead. Hard to say whether the evisceration or the exsanguination killed him first, but hey. Why not both? It doesn't really matter.

June 22, 2015: New York

Natasha is used to handling cleanup. It's not even the first time she's done it for Barnes; in Nice, sure, but in several other cities where they'd come in to take down the local chapter of Hydra only to find that someone had beaten them there--no mystery who.

The dead guy was extremely dead. Hard to say whether the evisceration or the exsanguination killed him first, but hey. Why not both? It doesn't really matter. 

Of more interest to Natasha was the barf next to the bodies, and what that says about Barnes's emotional state. She has been running on the assumption that they haven't heard from him because he's moved from showy ops where he blows shit up to quieter hits against whatever's left of Hydra higher-ups. She is now considering the possibility that he's been keeping his head down and his nose clean because he really is trying to put a person back together and has realized that maybe a murder spree isn't the best way to do it. 

She's a little envious. The thought never really occurred to her when she was getting out of the Red Room. 

She'd called cleaners to take care of the dead guy, but the two living ones she's now got in a room Maria Hill has assured her is extremely secure. They'd had some discreet medical attention, and now she's just waiting for them to wake up. She changed out of her fancy dress into her Widow gear, and she has a Ka-Bar out so she can showily clean her fingernails if these assholes ever wake up. 

She's settled in and waiting when she hears the door open. She glances up, expecting the doctor, and is mildly irritated but not entirely surprised to see Steve, still in his suit from the party. He runs a hand through his hair, rumpling it. "Nat, what the hell?" he says, which, excuse you, Steve, she could say the same thing. 

"What are you doing here?" she says instead, because it's more precise. _What the hell_ covers a lot of ground. 

"I came to find you," he says, like it's obvious, then visibly takes a moment to interpret her unimpressed stare. "I called Maria." She stares some more. "You disappeared from the party and there were unofficial official vehicles outside. I was worried." 

"Really," she says. 

"Not about you, obviously. About whoever you happened to." 

 She hops down off the chair and walks closer. "As it turns out, I didn't happen to these guys." 

"Oh?" Steve's mouth twists. She can see him trying to find the right words, so she cuts him off with what she hopes aren't too much the wrong ones.

"James Barnes happened." 

Steve goes perfectly still, like a cat about to pounce. "Where is he?" 

"In the wind, probably." Emotions chase each other across Steve's face, and she takes pity on him. "These guys spooked him. He said he wasn't sure whether they were after him or you, but they wanted blood. As in, they literally had syringes and sample tubes." 

Steve's eyebrows vacillate between anger and concern. "You talked to him?"  

Because of course that's his takeaway. "You're not worried about the assholes trying to steal your genetic material?" 

He shrugs. It looks tired. "That's been an ongoing concern since I got out of the tube. I'm really more worried about Bucky." 

"He looks good. Better than in Nice."

Steve's sigh is a soft exhalation of hurt. "He came to you instead of me?" 

"He didn't come to me, Steve. I came to him." She puts her hand on his arm and grips. "I've had a facial-recognition algorithm looking for him around the Tower since just after Insight day. If he came looking for you to finish his mission, I needed to know." Now she needs to know if whoever wanted Barnes's blood has the same kind of thing set up, or if they thought the charity gig was a good opportunity to get to Steve. 

Steve frowns at the two unconscious men in the hospital beds. Natasha is pretty sure he doesn't really see them. "He didn't, though. Did he say why he was here?"  

"He came to see you," she tells him, as gently as she can. "He saw Sokovia on the news. He knew you were alive, but he needed to reassure himself that you were okay."

Steve throws himself into one of the uncomfortable chairs, puts his head in his hands, and laughs. "That asshole," he says. It's...not the reaction Natasha expected. She sits next to him and lays a hand on his shoulder. Steve turns and hugs her, awkward over the chair arms, and she can feel the tension in him, never mind the laughter. After a minute, he stops laughing and lets her go. He scrubs his eyes with his palms. "He came all the way from wherever he was, fucking looked at me from across the street, and then left? I guess saying hi in person didn't occur to him." 

"Of course it did." He looks at her, waiting. "He wanted to, Steve. He didn't think he could. You're the only person who knows what he was like before. It's probably easier to talk to someone who never knew him." Steve looks honestly bewildered by this. She tries to be more direct. "He didn't say, but I think he's afraid of disappointing you. He doesn't remember everything. He's worried he might never." 

"How could that possibly disappoint me?" Steve rubs a hand down his face. "I just want to help him, Nat. It's driving me crazy not to help him. You wouldn't believe how much he always helped me. And now, when he needs it--" He tilts his head back, blinking rapidly, suddenly looking young in a way he usually does not. It's because he's almost always so _certain_ , she decides, much more so than people his biological age; for this one moment, he looks lost and unsure.  

"He's going to come to you," she says with as much assurance as she can muster. "He said once he has his shit together, he'll come back." 

"Really?" Steve has no right to sound so damn hopeful. 

"Really." One of the unconscious men moans, and Natasha cracks her knuckles and stands up. "You might want to scram, Steve. I've got a lot of questions for them." 

"Oh, no," Steve says. "I won't get in your way, but I'm sticking around. I'm very curious about their answers." 

*

June 24, 2015: New York

Steve's brain has been like the world's moodiest rollercoaster for the last couple of days--up into the stratosphere: _he said he's coming back!_ and then down into mopetown: _he was right here and he didn't even make contact_ , with a detour through a few rings around the loops of _I can't believe these fuckers are still trying to steal my blood_ \--so he's taken himself out of the tower and into the sunshine in hopes he can settle himself down. He is aware of the security detail following him and accepts them with the best grace he's got. It would be stupid not to, given the blood-stealing thing. 

He's even more angry about the fact that these assholes weren't even really after Bucky, they were after him and thought they'd get a two-for-one supersoldier bonus when they saw him. Maybe if they hadn't attacked, Bucky would've stuck around. But then, maybe they'd have attacked him again.

Maybe Bucky's right to stay away. 

He's not going far; just to Bryant Park. He just wants to sit outside, anonymous in a crowd, feel the sun on his face, maybe eat something; let the sense of being just one small part of a vast and mostly indifferent humanity wash away some of this anger. He's got a baseball cap pulled low over his face, a pair of sunglasses to hide his eyes, but he's mostly counting on the tendency of his fellow New Yorkers to be too seen-it-all to much care about a celebrity. 

He buys a couple of tartines and a coffee from a kiosk and goes to find himself a nice patch of grass to stretch out in. The buzz of other people's conversations surrounds him, some in languages he knows, some he can't identify. The food and the sound and the sunlight do their work, and some of the tension leaves his shoulders. He lies back and pulls the cap over his face and just...drifts for a while. He's not so stupid as to actually take a nap in the middle of a park two days after he was the target of an attack, but he can at least pretend for a few minutes that he's a normal person. 

After a while he flips over onto his stomach. He digs his phone out of his pocket and arranges it so that it's in his shadow. He opens the message that he looks at most often: a small black star tattooed on a pale wrist, the creases of the palms visible in the top of the screen, the shadows of the fingers only discernible when one has stared at the photo dozens of times. He shouldn't be able to recognize someone from just a few square inches of skin, but he's never doubted who was behind this particular blocked number. 

What does it mean? Is it the star from his metal shoulder? Why would he want to mark himself with that? It has to be something significant. It's the only communication Steve has had from him beside the file on Hydra, and that didn't count; it wasn't a personal message, but a plan of attack. 

Steve touches the screen as if he can reach Bucky through it, stroke a finger down his wrist. Natasha says Bucky's working on fixing himself up, that he means to come home to Steve. Steve wants to help him with a fire that could burn off oceans, but he remembers what it was like to need so much help, and how resentful it made him. 

When Steve was sick, when Steve was broke, when Steve's life was falling apart after his mother died, Bucky had always wanted to help, but Steve would've rather eaten nails than just let him, most of the time. He remembers that, whether Bucky does or not. Maybe Bucky feels that same desperation to do it on his own. 

Or maybe it's like in Italy, after Azzano. Bucky hadn't wanted Steve to know how broken he was. He'd pretended he was fine, and Steve, like an asshole, had let him. He wants to do better this time, but it's hard to know what better is, especially if Bucky doesn't want to be found.  

Yet. Bucky doesn't want to be found _yet_. 

"All right, Buck," Steve whispers to no one. "I trust you." 

He shuts the photo on his phone, stands up, and walks home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: More tattoos! Bucharest!


	14. A Line in Ink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes has made a friend in Bucharest.  
> ***  
> For nearly the first time since New York, he feels…good. Like his body is something to enjoy, not just a machine to push through days.

The air is crisp, but the sun is warm enough that it feels pleasant rather than cold. Leaves on the trees lining the streets are all shades of gold and orange, and Barnes takes a deep lungful of air as he walks past the market stalls between his apartment and the tattoo parlor. For nearly the first time since New York, he feels…good. Like his body is something to enjoy, not just a machine to push through days.

It's pleasing that he feels this way today. Today is a big day.

He'd been in a bad place after New York; he had known it at the time, but only as he came out of it could he see how bad. It wasn't so much that he'd been attacked, but that he killed when he didn't mean to. Didn't want to. Maybe it was a little ridiculous to weigh one death more on top of his list of sins, but for the past year and a half, he had decided what violence to mete out. He'd been unable to escape the feeling that the dead man had stolen some part of his autonomy from him--though had he succeeded, he'd have stolen a much greater part of it. He did not regret that he was free, even if it meant the man was dead; he regretted losing the choice. And he had not missed the feeling of blood covering his hands, of viscera sliding out of an open wound. He didn't want it.

He spent most of the time in the ship back to Brussels alternating between panic attacks and a terrible lassitude that made it difficult to leave the confines of his tiny cabin. He'd had a hard time even paying attention to the food reminder alarm on his phone. Two days before landing in Brussels, he'd finally taken out his notebook and gone over his list and made a plan of action. Retrieve the weapons he'd cached at the train station; muddy his trail; find a place to hole up and settle down like he'd had in Prague.

By the end of August, he'd gotten to Bucharest and stayed. He'd found an apartment, paid for in cash: one room, small, but he didn't need much space. Maybe he was feeling a little paranoid after New York; he'd gotten a corner unit at the top of a narrow staircase so if anyone else came after him, they'd only be able to get one at a time up the stairs, and he'd arranged his sparse furniture to minimize the ability of anyone looking in to see him and to maximize his ability to block the entrances. He hid his duffel full of weaponry under carefully pried-up floorboards and nailed them back in until they were indistinguishable from the rest of the floor. If things really went to shit, he could escape through the windows to surrounding rooftops. 

But as time went on and no threats showed up on his perimeter, he began to think he'd gotten away with it; a room of his own, a space to try and climb back up the mountain he'd slid down when he'd killed that man in New York. The difference between this time and the mess he'd been immediately after Insight day is that now, he knows it can be done. He has done it before. It had been exhausting to think of the climb, but at least he had known where to set his feet: in the footsteps he'd left the first time. He'd even left himself a guide: his notebooks were there to tell him what he did before, so he carefully wrote down his way out of the most recent backslide as well.

And it's working; today is proof.

The bell over the door rings as he pushes it open. "It's me," he says loudly, so Elena won't worry. He's talked to her about leaving the door unlocked before the shop is open, but she does it anyway. He reminds himself that it's her choice, not his, and locks it after himself when he comes in.

"In the back," Elena calls out. "Are you excited?"

His mouth twists into a grin. "Yeah, actually." He walks past the front counter with its displays of flash, toward the curtained rooms in the back where the machines are.

He'd met her a few months ago. When he started to come back to himself, he'd gone looking for a tattoo parlor he felt comfortable in. He'd started talking to Elena about the bigger design he wanted on his back someday, and she was helping him refine the design. He had asked her questions about the shop, about her life, and somehow he'd ended up helping out around the shop. She'd shown him how to use the machines: how to change the needles, how to apply ink, how to run the parts through the autoclave to sterilize them, where to dispose of needles and razors. She'd let him use the machines on grapefruits and oranges and apples, a series of lopsided designs that slowly got less wonky. She was apologetic that she can't pay him, but he doesn't mind. His expenses are few, his resources taken from various Hydra bases are plentiful, and he is learning so much.

He's met her children, two boys that she brings to the shop sometimes. He's met her boyfriend, and, just recently, her girlfriend, which led to some quiet googling about dating two people at the same time so that he doesn't put his foot in his mouth. He knows that she was born in Sibiu, came to Bucharest for university, and stayed here. He knows that she is kind when he has bad days. 

But today is not one of those days. 

She looks up when he comes in, her smile creasing lines around her mouth and eyes. She has brown hair braided back into a crown and dark eyes, and she mostly wears tank tops that show off her full sleeves and the tattoos peeking over the line of her shirt. "Well? Get some gloves on, Luca. Let's do this." 

He smiles back. Either she's impatient for him to try, or she's rushing so he doesn't have a chance to get nervous. He turns his back on her, removes his leather gloves, jams them in his pocket, and pulls on a pair of nitrile gloves, then turns back.

They went over the design yesterday. It is very simple. He doesn't want to try anything complicated, not for his first time.    

"Are you sure you don't want to do this on me?" Elena taps a bare spot on her shoulder. "It might be easier." 

"Thanks, but…" Barnes shrugs. Elena's tattoos are so beautiful. He doesn't want his clumsy first effort to mar her skin. And it's fitting that he carry this with him as well, no matter how ugly it turns out. His is certain that tattooing fruit has not really prepared him for a living breathing (possibly squirming) human being beneath the needles.

"All right, then. Up you go." He clambers up onto the tattoo chair. He dressed for today: sweatpants that he can easily shove above his knee, which he does now. The star with a shadow from Atlanta is long-healed, of course. Elena passes him a disposable razor, and he carefully shaves away a rectangle below it. She passes him the transfer paper with the design and he positions it carefully, moving it until he is satisfied that it lines up with the tattoo above it. Elena smoothes soapy water over his skin, and he presses the transfer into place, applying pressure.

"Looks good," Elena says. "Is that exactly how you want it?"

He examines it. It's good. "Yes."

"Are you ready?"

He makes himself meet her gaze so she can see that he is. He signed the paperwork with his assumed name yesterday, so there's nothing to keep him from it. She sets up the machine. It's a little awkward manipulating the foot pump with his right leg while his left is bent so he can work on it, but it's not too bad. He sets up the outline needles, checks the depth, and loads black ink.

He takes a breath.

The buzz of the tattoo machine is familiar. He's tattooed dozens of fruit by this point. This is just his leg. It's okay if he fucks it up.

He starts a little too light, but figures out how to adjust. The pain is minimal, here in the swell of his calf muscle, not like the star at his wrist. He traces the outline slowly, with care, and there aren't too many places where the line thins out or blobs. 

"Good," Elena says when he finishes. He wipes away blood and excess ink with a paper towel and admires his work. "Do you need a break?" she asks.

"No, I'd like to go ahead." He loads the needle with black ink again--this tattoo is so small, he doesn't bother changing to a larger set of needles to fill it in. He takes his time with the fill just like it did with the outline, working methodically, until he gets to the part where the star-shadow above is red. He fades the black out until it's gray so he can blend it with the red. Then he has to stop and wipe the blood away, stretch his bent leg, and clean the needle of the black ink. Then he loads it up with red and fills in the rest. It doesn't take long. 

"Look at that," Elena says. "You did it!" 

"Turned out pretty okay," he says as he wipes away the blood again. 

"It's a good first effort. You can be proud. A couple more, and maybe you can help me out here sometimes." 

"Really?" Maybe he should have expected that, but he didn't. He turns the thought over in his head. A normal job, an exchange of services for money. Still blood and pain, but the kind that leave people happy at the end, not dead. Creation, not destruction. "I'd like that." 

"We'll figure it out," Elena says. "You know what to do for the aftercare. Take a minute to admire your work, and then you can help me set up for opening." 

"Thanks." Barnes waits until she leaves, disposes of the nitrile gloves, and covers his left hand with his leather glove again. He puts the ointment and plastic wrap over his stinging skin and smoothes them out. Beneath his older tattoo is a simple elongated infinity, red shading into black to match the star above it, looping endlessly back into itself. 

A line without an end to get to. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What I'm envisioning here is something like this, but not hastily doodled in five minutes:  
> 


	15. Second Star on the Right

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things are going pretty well for Barnes in Bucharest. Then he hears that Peggy Carter has died.   
> \----  
>  _Note_ : new tags added.   
> _additional content note_ : brief mention of miscarriage

By January, Elena has Barnes tattoo a small bird on her hip. She declares herself satisfied with the piece, and he begins to take shifts at the shop. He doesn't do any of the bigger pieces, but she lets him do some of the simpler tattoos on walk-in customers. He gets good at turning to the sink to change his nitrile gloves so clients don't get a glimpse of his left hand. He gets better at talking casually to people, at building a conversation to distract a nervous client, at explaining what to expect about the pain. He is surprised the first time someone cries in front of him; the girl looks young to him, but the dove holding a scroll that she wants on her hip is to memorialize a miscarriage. The numbers on the scroll are a date. She says she is sorry for crying, and he finds some words. 

"You don't have to apologize for grief," he tells her, and tears silently roll down her face as he inks her design. When it's done, she thanks him and squeezes his right hand tightly before she goes to pay. 

He is not the only one to commemorate his life on his skin. He looks at his chest, at the tattoo of Steve's dog tags, and thinks, _I don't have to apologize for grief either_. It's okay to mourn who he used to be. Who Steve used to be. The friendship that had been.

But just because that time is gone, doesn't mean nothing can rise from its ashes. He thinks about hope; about his notebooks and lists, and what he hopes he is becoming. 

*

In February, Barnes realizes he's been anticipating the food alarm on his phone for several weeks in a row. He isn't ready to turn it off--it hasn't been that long since he had days bad enough that it was the only thing that got calories in him. He cooks more, expands his repertoire; he has thought of food as fuel long enough. Now he looks for flavors he likes and tries to find the pleasure in it as well. 

He resumed his efforts at training his body after New York; not to hone himself into a useful weapon, but simply to push himself. He likes tracking the stretch of his efforts: how many burpees he can do before he feels the effort of it; how many push ups before his arms and chest begin to burn. He's been relatively muscular since he was a welterweight boxer at the YMCA in the 1930s, but not like this. 

Sometimes at night, he runs through the rooftops, flinging himself from building to building simply because he can. His body does not have to be a weapon, but it has finely-honed reflexes and as he discovered--rediscovered?--in New York, there's pleasure in that, too. He can run and jump and take advantage of action and reaction, of the trajectories it has always been second nature to him to calculate. 

Those are the nights he sleeps best; those without dreams. That sleep he hasn't had since 1943; the sleep of an innocent. He treats those nights as a gift. 

*

He doesn't always dream nightmares. 

Barnes dreams of Steve. This is not like other dreams he's had of Steve, the ones that are images of their shared past. He's pretty sure this never happened; that Steve never stood in the shadows of their Brooklyn apartment and pulled his shirt over his head--at least, not the way Barnes sees it, like it was a show for him. He dreams of Steve the way he saw him in New York, dressed for the life he's made there; but in his dream, Steve isn't seen through a scope, talking to someone else. In his dream, Steve crosses the room to him, and there is no one else there. 

In his dream, Steve takes off his suit jacket and tosses it aside, pulls the knot from his tie and lets it hand, framing the line of buttons of his shirt. Barnes reaches out and undoes them one by one until he can slide the shirt over Steve's shoulders and look at the broad expanse of pale skin. He hears the buzz of the tattoo machine and he is bent over Steve's arm, laying in ink to mark him, and in the dream, he thinks,  _Mine_.

He wakes sweating and hard. What the hell. Steve isn't his; he's his own. 

This is some backbrain shit. But the image won't leave him, of Steve permanently marked by Barnes's hand. Not the way he'd marked him on the helicarrier, not with injury, but with beauty. For adornment. For something he chose. In the dream he'd been tattooing the swell of Steve's bicep. He can't remember what the design was. Would that be where Steve wanted to be tattooed? There was so much of him now, so much possible canvas... 

He shifts, and the light friction of the sheets against his erection is suddenly both unbearable and wonderful. Barnes has woken from sleep hard before, but not like this. Not like his skin is catching fire. Not thinking of Steve, either, and maybe that's the difference. 

Maybe it isn't right, to think of Steve and do this, but it's a part of himself he didn't know he lost, this bonfire along his nerve endings, and his body remembers, hips rocking up into his fingers as he takes hold. He might have forgotten the feeling, but some part of him remembers the motions, the speed of his hand, the twist of his wrist, and it isn't long at all before he's arching up and convulsing and spilling all over his hand and stomach. 

How did he forget this? It feels so good, and it's all his; a part of his body he can claim for his own. It's even easier than learning to talk to people--the only one he needs here for this is him. He shudders as he cleans himself off with a  washcloth, sensitive and shaking. He feels broken open, an oyster without its shell, delicate and raw.  

He is ninety percent certain that even the image he dreamed from Brooklyn in the thirties never happened. He is ninety-eight percent certain that Bucky thought about it. But if it's a problem, it's a problem for another time. Right now he feels good, and boneless, and like some animal part of himself has been returned to him. 

*

In March, Elena lets him do a larger tattoo. He is confident enough in his lines now that he doesn't feel nervous about the scope of the piece, which covers the man's chest. It takes several sessions. The last falls on Bucky's birthday, which is neither Barnes's birthday, nor the man Elena knows as Luca's. The client is happy, and that's enough for Barnes to feel satisfied--no. To feel proud. He is proud of the work of his hands. The man lets him take a picture of the finished piece. 

"You definitely want to put that in your portfolio," Elena says, and he finds himself smiling at the thought.  

Elena and the other tattoo artist, Samir, take him to a bar to celebrate after they lock up the shop. Elena and Samir tell stories about clients: the weirdest shit they've been asked to tattoo on people, the best clients and the worst. Barnes doesn't have as much material to draw from, but he tells them about the guy who wanted a Budweiser label on his calf (why) and the woman with five paw prints around her ankle, one for each of her cats. He doesn't tell them about the girl with the dove; it feels as if to do so would be to intrude on the grief she shared with him. It was private, between the two of them. 

At the end of it, Elena buys them each a shot of a vodka flavored with some kind of flower, and they toast Barnes's work one last time before they go to their separate homes. 

Barnes pulls down the notebook in which he documents his project of becoming human. He notes the events of the day, hesitates, and writes _Today I was happy_.

*

April marks the second year since Project Insight fell. There are articles in the paper, but they are smaller than the year before, and this time, they don't take Barnes by surprise. 

He has been practicing tattooing with his left hand. The mechanical arm has fine motor control and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, very steady--he'd used it to shoot with, after all, and had been equally accurate (very) with either hand. He doesn't let Elena or Samir see him practice, but a series of oranges from the fruit stand between his apartment and the tattoo shop get bedecked with tiny stars. It's his second birthday, after all. 

He waits until Elena and Samir have gone to pick up lunch and there are no customers. He sets up the machine and the black ink. He rolls up his arm and shaves a patch of his wrist bare. He applies the tiny transfer.

The tattoo takes hardly any time at all. Another small star, just to the right of the one he had done a year ago. Instead of solid black, this one is open: an outline of a star, with the possibility of light. He does a good job. The lines are straight and clean. He applies ointment and plastic wrap, and the machine is sterilized and ready for the next client by the time Elena and Samir return. 

When he gets home that night, the tattoo is already healed. He peels away the plastic and rubs in the last of the ointment into his skin. 

Then he takes out his phone and snaps a photo. He sends it to Steve. Steve won't know it, but it's a progress report of sorts. And a promise; that he is getting better at being a person, that he is his thinking of Steve, that he'll be able to come home to him. 

*

In May, Steve is in the news again. In Nigeria, this time. Lagos. Steve's team doesn't come off well. Whether they achieved their objective or not he has no way of knowing from the articles, but though none of them are seriously injured, eleven civilians are killed. Something about it sets the hair on the back of his neck rising up. Something feels off. 

But he doesn't have enough information to say what it is. He spends far too long hesitating over Steve's number, over Romanoff's; but in the end, he decides his intuition that something is hinky isn't enough to justify contact. 

Elena has him working on a back piece for a woman, his second major piece. It's a tree, from roots to flowering branches, filled with green leaves between her shoulder blades and brown bark along her spine. She has a lot to say about music between zoning out to the buzz of the machine and the endorphin hit that follows, and Barnes gets a lot of suggestions for the playlists he utilizes between his apartment and the shop and back again. 

There's a lot of chatter about the Sokovia accords online and in the news. Barnes finds the whole idea troubling. Not that he thinks enhanced people shouldn't have to answer to anyone, but a lot of these situations crop up quickly. Are Steve and his buddies not to respond when aliens or robots or mad scientists attack? And besides, in an aliens-attacking-Manhattan situation, do you really want the assholes that decided chucking a nuke at New York was the solution to be the ones calling the shots? 

He doesn't have any answers. But he thinks about the questions a lot. 

*

In June, he finishes the back piece. The woman is delighted with it, and her delight is infectious. He snaps a shot for his portfolio, and she promises to come back when it's healed and let him get another photo without swelling and ointment. He walks home, listening to an album of Cuban music the client recommended. He can enjoy the music without thinking of the times he's been in Cuba; his handlers hadn't exactly been taking him to music halls when he was there. His phone buzzes, and he slides it out of his pocket. 

One of the Google alerts he's set up has pinged. He clicks the link and all of the good feeling swelling inside him drains away. The linked article is Peggy Carter's obituary. He reads the list of her accomplishments with only half his brain. The other half is trying to process the tangle of emotions inside of him. Carter had been a hell of an agent, a hell of a person, and the world is smaller without her; that's reason enough to grieve. Even when Bucky was--call it what it was--jealous of her, he had respected and admired her. And sometimes their eyes would meet, warily, because she saw a lot more than she admitted out loud, and he had the sense of a connection between them, an acknowledgement of what they both saw when they looked at Steve. 

Barnes's former self feared too much to bolster that connection, but it had been there; he grieves that connection, and the missed opportunity, too.

He knows that Steve, wherever he is, is wrecked right now. Whatever else might have been, whatever was lost when Steve flew the plane into the ice, Peggy saw him when he was frail Steve Rogers, not Captain America, and saw that here was someone worth taking a chance on. Steve loved her for that, and the time lost between then and now won't have changed that. 

Barnes's feet have kept moving while his brain was otherwise occupied. He lets himself into his apartment, sits, and rereads the article. 

The funeral will be in London. 

Steve will be there. Steve will be hurting. Barnes could go--

Barnes absolutely cannot. Whatever Margaret Carter was to Steve, to Bucky, she was also the founder of SHIELD. Her funeral and everything about it is going to be crawling with agents in case any terrorist agency sees an opportunity to make a statement. Barnes is unquestionably on every watchlist. It would be the deepest folly to even try. 

That doesn't mean he doesn't want to. 

His brain keeps tossing up plans at odd moments, ways he could intercept Steve en route to or from the funeral, ways he could find him in London, in New York. The part of him that's used to planning missions is planning them now, but with the intent to comfort, not destroy. It would be amusing, except for how much he wishes he could do it. 

But in the end, he doesn't go to Steve. 

Steve comes to him.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Barnes is listening to the [Buena Vista Social Club](http://www.buenavistasocialclub.com/). 
> 
> Next up: Civil War! With approximately 635% more internal dialogue and Feelings.


	16. (nearly drove me out of my head)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve finds Barnes in Bucharest. Alas, he's not the only one.

Barnes is restless. Peggy's funeral was yesterday. There was a bombing in Vienna. The two events seem unconnected, but the jittery feeling of something not-right won't leave him, a footstep lingering near his grave. 

He isn't working today. The smallness of his apartment doesn't usually bother him--he doesn't need anything bigger--but today it feels confining. After his fourth attempt to read a book finds him skimming the same paragraph, he decides he could go to the market and get something to eat. Maybe some of this buzz of energy beneath his skin will leave him. 

He always dresses a little too warmly for the weather--additional clothes obscure his outline as well as concealing his metal arm--and he adds a ball cap as well today. The walk to the fruit stall is a familiar one, and it settles him in his own skin a little. He chats with the woman that runs the stall, buys some plums. 

It's on his walk home that the sense of something wrong hits him again. A man in the news stand is staring at him. Why. He adjusts his ball cap, walks closer. The man runs away. 

Fuck. This is not good. Every hair on his body stands up. Beneath his shirt and jacket, the plates of his metal arm whir and resettle, recalibrating to fight a threat that isn't immediate. He stalks to the abandoned news stand and picks up a paper.

The bottom drops out of his stomach and his world at the same time. _Winter Soldier implicated in UN bombing in Vienna_ the headline reads, and plastered across the front page is a fucking photograph of him next to a van, with a close-up of his face, time stamped yesterday.  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. His brain is a cloud of buzzing, but after one self-indulgent second of freaking out, he tosses the paper back onto the counter and starts walking.  He needs his notebooks, first and foremost. He needs his stash of cash and emergency IDs. He wants his duffel bag full of weapons, but the backpack with the IDs and his two years' worth of notes on rebuilding a person are the most important thing. 

That, and his ear buds, which he was careless enough to leave the apartment without, he realizes. _Fuck_. If he's been made, which he had to assume he has been, he had to operate as if the person or people after him have the trigger words.

By the time he gets to his building, his pulse is elevated and his skin is clammy with sweat. He is not letting himself panic. Panic is counterproductive. He is not quite in the Asset's hyperfocused mission space, but he is aiming for something close to it. The questions he has about who has compromised him and why are distractions. They must wait until later.

His building seems to be undisturbed, but he doesn't trust it. He runs up the stairs silently, stopping at every landing to listen. Nothing. At least, not yet. 

His door is unlocked. He stares at it for a full five seconds. Of all the people in the world, white hat, black hat, and a rainbow of shades of gray, who the fuck would be careless enough to leave him a note in all caps like this?

He pushes the door open silently--he has long since ensured the hinges are silent--and his heart stutters against his ribs so painfully it's like someone actually hit him like a drum from the inside. 

Steve is standing by his refrigerator with one of his early notebooks--

Oh. 

No. It's much worse than that. Captain America is standing next to his refrigerator with one of his early notebooks in his hand, looking at a pasted-in picture of himself in uniform. Yes, Barnes had been trying to figure out the Steve-ness of Steve, but also he'd been trying to remember why Bucky had liked the uniform so much. Shelve the embarrassment; it's Captain America here instead of Steve because he thinks that Barnes blew up the UN. Is he here to bring him in? Barnes trusts Steve, but he doesn't trust SHIELD, and he certainly doesn't trust whatever plans a UN counter-terrorism task force might have for him. If he gets taken in, that's the end to choices and personal autonomy. He will be dead, or kept in a box, or he will be a weapon again, pointed in directions he won't be able to choose.

Fuck.

" _Heads up, Cap. German Special Forces approaching from the south,_ " says a voice over the comm in Steve's ear. Another good reminder; they think Barnes committed an act of terrorism--fine, _another_ act of terrorism, a _more recent_ act of terrorism--and other people are listening with Steve's ears. Barnes can't say anything to Steve that he doesn't want heard by Steve's team. SHIELD, maybe, if Steve's satisfied they cleaned house after Project Insight. Maybe someone else. Barnes doesn't have enough information to speculate. He should have made contact with Romanoff.  

"Understood," Steve murmurs into the comm, then turns, catches sight of Barnes, and stills. Barnes aches at his expression. He looks so young, and so open. So easily hurt. And then his face resolves into determination. He's here with the cowl on, Barnes reminds himself. "Do you know me?" 

 _Really?_ "You're Steve." And then, for the benefit of whoever's on the other end of the earpiece, "I read about you in a museum." 

He can't give away how much he remembers and how much he doesn't. That's one of the few advantages he has if anyone wanted to resurrect the Winter Soldier is listening in.

" _They've set the perimeter_ ," whoever it is says into Steve's ear while his face does a complicated thing in Barnes's direction. Barnes tries not to look at the places he's hidden his weapons and his notebooks. He probably doesn't have time to go for both. 

"I know you're nervous," Steve says, "and you have plenty of reason to be. But you're lying." Well, duh, Rogers. He can't figure out whether Steve thinks he did it. All Barnes can do is tell the truth.

"I wasn't in Vienna. I don't do that anymore." As ought to be clear to anyone paying attention to how mysterious explosions in current and former Hydra bases have dropped by eighty-seven percent in the last year and a bit. 

" _They're entering the building,_ " Steve's earpiece warns. Every muscle in Barnes's body tenses. Action is coming for him, whether he wants it or not. And, oh, he does not. He's never going to get to finish the calf piece he was working on. Elena and Samir will wonder what happened to him--or maybe not. Maybe they'll find out on the news.

Steve pins him with his extremely baby blues. Barnes's pulse elevates even further. "Well, the people who think you did are coming here now. And they're not planning on taking you alive."

It's not like it's a surprise. His time here was only ever a reprieve, not an escape. He's done a lot of godawful things that a lot of people _should_ be furious about, even before you get to the brand new stuff that he didn't do. "That's smart. Good strategy."

The voice in Steve's ear whispers about the roof being compromised. Another fuck. That was one of his escape routes.

"This doesn't have to end in a fight, Buck." Barnes had somehow forgotten how irritating it is when Steve looks at him with big eyes and straight-up lies to him.

"It always ends in a fight." Barnes pops his glove off. They know who he is anyway, and he might have to punch through metal or concrete. 

" _Five seconds_ ," Steve's earpiece says. 

"You pulled me from the river. Why?"

Does he really expect Barnes to start talking about his feelings when his team is listening in and German Special Forces are five seconds away? "I don't know," Barnes says instead, because come on, Steven.

" _Three seconds_ ," Steve's earpiece warns, even as he says, "Yes, you do." So stubborn. So sure he's right; and, well. He is. But this isn't the time.

" _Breach_!" Steve's comm yells, and then a grenade comes in through the window, and Steve bats it away with his shield, and it could be 1944 again, except for the part where Steve's not sure whether Barnes is a good guy or not. Another grenade rolls to Barnes's feet, and he kicks it at Steve, who covers it with the shield to contain the explosion. Yep. Just like old times. 

Barnes tosses his mattress up to block a window, kicks his table into the hallway so no one can get in the door. Did he think he might be too paranoid when he set up this place? He thanks his past self for his foresight even while he laments that he was right. But there are others windows, and guys in tactical gear coming through them, spraying the apartment with gunfire. He tosses one across the room and Steve holds another still. Barnes kicks him out onto the balcony. 

Steve grabs his shoulder, and Barnes slithers around to face him. "Buck, stop! You're going to kill someone." That's rich coming from Mr.-Leaves-a-Trail-of-Traumatic-Head-Injuries. Who happens to be standing right where Barnes needs to be. Barnes flips him onto his back, then punches through the floorboards right next to him to retrieve his backpack. It's a dick move, yes, but Barnes is having a difficult day. 

"I'm not going to kill anyone," he promises, and tosses his backpack onto the roof of the building across the street. There go his notebooks, his fake identities, a few weapons, and enough money for him to find somewhere to hole up and figure out how to clear his name. Now he just has to get himself to them and out of here. 

Special Forces fire again. Don't they give a shit that Captain America is standing next to the guy they're trying to perforate? Barnes blocks bullets with his metal arm until Steve gets upright with the shield up. Barnes slings his arm around his neck and for a moment, the two of them are together behind the shield. There is no time, but Barnes can smell Steve, and he wishes he could stop and take that in. 

Instead, he tosses Steve at the guys on the balcony outside. Steve and his shield are heavy enough to take them down, and it'll get Steve away from the target Special Forces are shooting at. Barnes holds his hand out to block bullets and fights his way to the door to the stairwell. Even before he punches through it, he can hear it swarming with more of these guys. He's fought his way out of worse, he supposes, but he wishes he didn't have to. He kicks the door out onto a few guys, then calculates trajectories and assesses possible weapons, attacking non-lethally, because these guys aren't Hydra and he told Steve he wouldn't. He's two landings down by the time Steve bursts through the empty doorway of his former apartment.  

Special Forces guys keep coming--up the stairs, through the windows, through the skylight. Steve catches up to Barnes and breaks a guy's gun with his shield right as the guy gets Barnes in his sights. Despite himself, Barnes can't help catching Steve's eye; this isn't at all how he wanted to see him, but here they are, with Steve risking himself in the middle of all of it for him. Steve shouldn't be fighting Special Forces for Barnes. This can't go on, but Steve will never back away from this fight on his own. That's just not how he operates. Barnes will have to get the fight away from Steve himself. 

Barnes vaults the railings and lets himself fall three stories before he catches a railing with his metal arm. Pain radiates out from the anchor point into his shoulder, his spine, curling around his gut, but he doesn't have time to let it slow him down. He crawls over the railing and kicks down a door; the hallway leads to another balcony outside. He takes a breath and sprints, getting as much speed as he possibly can before he leaps the railing--

\--and his body is suspended in air, legs still pumping as if that could help carry him across the void--

\--and then he lands on the building across the way. His nights of running through the city couldn't have possibly prepared him for a leap like this, but he's glad he did it anyway; he has felt this moment of being held by nothing, defying gravity, and he's prepared when he hits the rooftop. The shock of impact reverberates through him. He rolls to bleed off some of his momentum and comes up next to his backpack. He grabs the straps and keeps running. 

A shadow comes up behind him. He barely has time to think _What the fuck?_ when he's clipped hard and goes down hard. He rolls up quick, but not as quickly as his unknown assailant: a powerfully-built man completely covered in some sort of black cat costume. He doesn't make a snide remark mentally when claws that even _sound_ sharp pop out of the man's fingertips. This guy was fast enough to catch him and strong enough to hit like that. He's taking him seriously.

 _It doesn't have to end in a fight,_ Steve had said. 

 _I wish,_ Barnes thinks, and goes on the offensive. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Steve, it's always embarrassing when you get busted reading someone's diary. Having now watched the Bucharest scene from Civil War approximately 800 times while writing this, I'm not sure what Steve expected Bucky to say to his questions when they can pretty clearly both hear Sam over the comm and know they only have a couple of seconds before Special Forces gets there. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> The chapter title is from Ella Fitzgerald's version of ["Cry Me a River."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gn9A-kdsRo)


	17. (you never shed a tear)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes's bad day continues to get worse. Why is this cat guy so desperate to kill him?

The man is enhanced, and he's not fucking around. 

He kicks Barnes square in the chest, hard enough to hurt, and when Barnes counters with punches, he blocks them all easily, even the metal arm. The man kicks him across the rooftop into a ventilation shed, then strikes with his claws, tearing through the metal behind Barnes as though it were paper. Barnes doesn't want to seriously injure him, but he might not have a choice if he doesn't want to get seriously dead himself. 

The guy flips Barnes over and pins him, then pulls back his arm to slash with those claws. Barnes's questing hand finds a length of metal bar and he manages to get it between his attacker and his vulnerable squishy parts. The man's claws take a little longer with the bar than they did with the shed, but before long, he slices through it. What the hell are those claws made of?

Barnes flings the scraps aside as the man attacks again, and barely manages to hold his hands away. Barnes strains to keep the claws from gouging his eyes. This guy fucking hates Barnes; those claws could be disemboweling him right now, but instead he's going for the face. Christ. Some tiny, miserable part of Barnes wonders who he killed. Just who exactly did he take out of this man's life? 

Bullets spray the rooftop. A helicopter hovers over them--Special Forces back for more. The man turns to look at it as bullets hit his back, but like they're an annoyance rather than a threat. Barnes revises his opinion of the guy's suit. Whatever it's made out of, Steve should have one too. If he's going to bespangle himself, he should have better than kevlar. 

Something drops out of the sky onto the helicopter's tail and sends it spinning away. It's Steve's friend--Sam Wilson, the one whose wings Barnes destroyed. Looks like he found another set. Barnes is aware of someone else rolling onto the roof-- _Steve, you dumbass, you're supposed to stay_ away _from the assholes shooting at me_ \--but he doesn't have attention to spare for him, because cat guy has not let up his assault on Barnes's face. 

Barnes gets a foot up and kicks him away, then scoops up his backpack and takes off. Finding out cat guy's specific grievance against him will have to wait until he's not trying to scrape Barnes's face off. Barnes works his arms into the straps as he runs, clicking the chest strap closed, then leaps off the building. He lands on a balcony and looks up--but the guy follows, of course, jamming his claws into the building and sliding down the wall as though he's rappelling down it. 

Barnes jumps the rest of the way to the ground and runs. It's too much to hope that he'll give up pursuit now. 

The helicopter has recovered and swung back around, and the guys are fucking shooting at him again. Jesus, do they just not care about civilians, spraying bullets on an open street? 

Barnes vaults a safety wall and drops down into the middle of traffic in a tunnel. He confirms his attacker is still in pursuit, then puts his head down and runs. Police sirens blare behind him. He sprints over a car ahead of him when it doesn't move quickly enough, then weaves around several others. There's an exhilaration to letting himself run as fast as he can, usually, but this adrenaline-fueled sprint just feels like desperation. 

A wall of police cars comes rushing up, right where the tunnel lets out into open air. _Fuck_. He changes course, leaping over a line of barrels into the other lane of traffic. The police cars brake hard, but he hears a vehicle behind him crash through the barrels, undeterred in its chase. He runs against traffic into open air. There's a motorcycle approaching. With a silent apology to the rider, he straight-arm shoves the guy (with his right arm; he doesn't want to kill) and before the motorcycle loses momentum, he flips it and leaps on.

He guns it, dodges police cars, weaves around columns to the sound of screeching brakes. He shakes much of his pursuit, but not all of it, so he leans into the motorcycle, slicing into another tunnel. Footsteps echo on the car behind him--the cat guy doesn't fucking quit--and throws his right hand out as he hears him leap. He catches him by the throat, but the brief moment of advantage shifts as the guy runs up the wall to the ceiling and jumps to the floor, pulling Barnes down.

Barnes digs his metal hand into the street for leverage and kicks cat-man off of him. He speeds off, but he can hear the guy chasing, then a grunt, and wingbeats--Sam Wilson, here with Steve to bring him in. _Not today_ , he thinks, and tosses an adhesive explosive at the tunnel ceiling. It explodes behind him, and he has one moment of hope that it baffled his pursuers before something--fucking cat guy--slashes through his back tire and sends the cycle crashing, and himself rolling, body absorbing the force as he hits the concrete. Another pain to add to the list. 

Cat guy is on him almost before he stops rolling as brakes squeal among the falling debris. The man's hand is raised to strike, but then a blur of red, white, and blue barrels into him. Steve's arms wrap his waist and pull the man away from Barnes, flinging him down the street. His claws dig into the street, scraping furrows as he slides to a stop. 

Barnes rises to his feet to stand next to Steve. It's over--the wail of sirens is getting louder and there's no egress he could take even if Steve let him, and he's not sure that he would. But the two of them are standing shoulder to shoulder as cat man slowly rises to his feet and police cars screech to a halt. Some part of Barnes's gut insists that if he is here, with Steve, then it won't be that bad. 

Of course, Barnes's gut has been wrong before. 

A fucking flying robot man descends from the sky, because of fucking course. There are dozens of guns pointed at them and Steve has an arm out--telling Barnes to hold off? Telling Special Forces to hold off? Good luck with that, Steve--and the cat man is standing at an uneasy detente. 

The flying robot man isn't Iron Man. This is a different one, and how many flying robot men are there, anyway? 

"Stand down," he says, and Steve slings the shield over his back. "Congratulations, Cap, you're a criminal." 

Barnes wants to snort--does this guy even know how many laws Steve broke to get into the army?--but he just raises his hands and Steve follows suit as Special Forces move in, guns drawn. One of them forces Barnes to the ground, none too gently, and Barnes lets himself be cuffed. What would be the point of throwing the man off? Of breaking the cuffs? They have him, and they have Steve. 

His pulse thumps against his throat, too fast, adrenaline still flooding his system, but now with nowhere to go. Panic hasn't hit him yet, or despair, but he can taste them on his tongue, looming to catch him. Everything he has tried to build is dust, now. A life without violence, without blood. He had it. He held it in his hands like a soap bubble: Fragile. Ephemeral. Destined to burst and dissolve into nothingness at the first disturbance, leaving only the memory of beauty.

They don't force Steve to the ground, but they cuff him too. Barnes hears Wilson being herded out of the rubble of the tunnel. The cat man takes off his mask. Barnes cranes his head to see who wanted to kill him so desperately and is rewarded with a knee in the back from the man cuffing him and the sight of a handsome dark-skinned man who stares down at him like a bug he'd very much like to step on. 

"Your highness," flying robot man says, and it clicks. The king of Wakanda died in the explosion in Vienna. This is the new king. His son. 

 _I'm sorry_ , Barnes wants to say. _I'm so sorry for what you've lost, but I didn't do it_. 

He doesn't say it, of course. As they haul him to his feet and drag him off, away from Steve and Wilson and robot man and the king who thinks he killed his father, he wonders if he'll get the chance to say anything at all. 

*

Barnes had worried about being put in a box, but he hadn't expected something quite like this.

The panic he'd felt on the horizon is a full-blown storm in his head now. He is in a box full of bright lights. The sides are made of thick, shatterproof plastic and steel. He is.

He is. 

He is restrained in almost every possible way. Metal hooks over his chest and shoulders. Metal bands his forearms, wrists, and ankles. The only thing keeping him from completely and utterly losing his shit is that his head is free. 

This isn't the chair, he tells himself, over and over again. This isn't the chair, and this isn't Hydra. 

His arm whirs beneath his shirt, the only sign of his distress he is unable to repress. He has schooled his face to stillness, because these soldiers aren't Hydra, but they are his captors, and one thing he has learned about captivity is that every reaction can be used against you. He cannot show what he feels or it will be taken away or twisted into a hook to turn him. 

He makes himself take slow, controlled breaths, because if he really panics and lets himself fight these restraints the way he wants to, he will hurt himself. He wishes he knew where they have Steve. They wouldn't put Captain America in a box like this, would they? Surely they would see that they don't need to. 

He is on a truck. No one has told him where they are taking him, but they have been moving a long time. Soldiers flank him, two on each side of the box, guns out even though he's in the fucking box. Twice during the drive, they take him to a bathroom and let him piss, hands and ankles shackled, guns trained on him. They give him water and some kind of vile protein shake. He drinks it because his body needs the calories, but both times, he has to talk himself back to calmness and into not throwing it right back up because he's terrified it might be drugged. He counts minutes until he can be certain that his brain isn't fogging up. 

By his reckoning, it has been the better part of a day when the truck finally stops and the plastic and steel box with him in it is unloaded. He wonders where they are and if Steve is still with him, somewhere out there. A forklift truck  lifts the box with him in it, and he feels a moment of bleak amusement at being lifted like a pallet full of boxes, but it fades swiftly when he sees Steve, Wilson, and the king of Wakanda getting out of a black van. He catches Steve's eye for an instant as he walks away, and then doors shut behind him, and Barnes is alone in his box again, surrounded by men with guns. 

*

His restraint prison has been plugged in and he has been left alone under florescent lights for some time before a man approaches and clicks on the speaker that will let him speak. He says he is here from the UN to evaluate him. Evaluate him for what? A lifetime in prison versus a swift execution? His fitness to stand trial? Who the fuck knows. He asks if Barnes knows where he is, and he has to bite back the words "in a box." He's been in a windowless truck since Bucharest. No one's told him where he is, so how should he know?

The man keeps calling him James, and Barnes doesn't like it. Perhaps it's irrational, but it feels like a denial. An attempt to separate the terrorist they believe him to be from the man he once was.

"My name is Bucky," he says, and it gives him a jolt to say it. It feels like it could be true, like after two years of trying, maybe he is closer to his former self than he thought. If he gets out of this, it's a thought to ponder. 

"You don't want to talk," the man says after a series of irritating questions, and Barnes thinks, _Not to you_.

Moments later, the lights go out and red safety lights start to flash. Somewhere, an alarm is probably going off. 

"What the hell is this?" Barnes asks. 

"Why don't we discuss your home?" the man says. "Not Romania. Certainly not Brooklyn. I mean your real home." 

He pulls a book out of his satchel and Barnes's stomach plummets. It's bound in red leather stamped with a black star. He knows that book. It is the dark mirror of the journals he made, his roadmap to personhood. _This_ book details how to dehumanize him. It's the Asset's user manual, with all the ways to strip his autonomy and turn him from Bucky Barnes back into the Winter Soldier.

The person he's spent two years piecing together, two years clawing back from what Hydra did to him--that person can be swept away with nothing more than a collection of words. His earbuds are still in his apartment in Bucharest, and his arms are trapped in the restraints. He pulls anyway, trying to free his hands to block what he knows is coming. 

"Longing," the man says in Russian, and Barnes tenses all over. 

"No," he says, although he knows it's futile. The man isn't going to stop because he asks him to, but at least this way, he knows he protested. He didn't go to this fate unresisting.

"Rusted," the man says, and Barnes waits for his nightmare--of all his nightmares, the worst--to descend on him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zemo, you asshole.
> 
> The chapter title is from the Ella Fitzgerald version of ["Cry Me a River."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gn9A-kdsRo)


	18. (I remember all that you said)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's always a fight.

"Stop," Barnes says, "Stop." 

But the man keeps going, the Russian rolling over Barnes in waves unstoppable as the ocean. 

Panic gives him strength. Barnes flexes his left hand until the plates pop up and sever the metal band holding him. Then he tears at the restraints, slams his metal fist against the window. 

But the man keeps speaking. The thick plastic starts to crack from the impact. Barnes redoubles his efforts, throwing his body against the window as though he could prevent the words from reaching him by sheer force. But they're coming over the speaker, too loud for his enhanced hearing to miss even if he jammed his fingers in his ears like a child trying to keep from hearing that Santa isn't real. 

He's never been able to prevent anything from happening, not since he got drafted. Couldn't stay at home. Couldn't keep Steve at home. Couldn't keep Zola from pumping him full of drugs and torturing him, pretending it was science, that first violation of self. Couldn't keep his self whole after he fell from the train, couldn't prevent his transformation into the Asset. Couldn't prevent their leaving traps and triggers hooked inside him, so that everything he's done, everything he's become over the last two years can be stripped away with a string of words.

Couldn't stop anything. Can't help himself now. 

The window finally gives and goes flying, Barnes following right behind it as the man says "freight car."

Barnes drops to his knees. 

The Asset stands up. 

"Soldier?" the man says. 

"Ready to comply," replies the Asset. 

*

Here's a thing Barnes has detailed in his journals: Barnes is not the Asset, doesn't want to be the Asset, but the Asset isn't free of James Buchanan Barnes. He doesn't remember everything--thank god; what he remembers is bad enough--but that's because they fried his brain every time a piece of his personality surfaced. All those things--the things he did--some part of him was there, watching as his body completed the orders he was given. The reason he doesn't remember is that they took it away; the memories he's gotten back, he can only assume are due to the remarkable plasticity of the human brain in general and his specific unique situation of being shot up full of Nazi science. 

But no one's regularly zapping him with near-lethal amperage these days. He gets to be a backseat passenger as the man gives him his orders. At first he just asks questions: about the mission where he killed Howard Stark and his wife ( _christ_ ), and then about the Siberian facility where the other Soldiers were made ( _oh god_ ). 

The man shuts the book with the star on the cover and looks at the Asset for a long moment. The Asset knows that this is not all he wants. No one ever just wants the Asset for information. 

The Asset is correct. The man gives him his orders. 

*

It's like a nightmare, but unlike the times where he has woken up covered in sweat and shaking in Prague, in Bucharest, this is all too real. He can feel the delicate bone in Steve's friend--Wilson's--jaw as he picks him up and throws him by his face. The metal of the elevator door crumpling around his metal hand is real, as is the solid breadth of Steve's chest as he pushes him through the hole he just made and into the elevator shaft. He can't even pull his punches. 

The Asset moves on, unbothered by the tiny voice wailing _stop_ in the back corners of his mind. He is calculating how to obtain weapons, routes of egress. Two guards try to stop him. The Asset does not have the same non-lethal perimeters that Barnes established for himself. He obtains their firearms while they try to contain him with batons, then dispatches them efficiently. As he prepares to shoot one, a burst of unidentified energy from an unknown source courses through him. 

He turns to find the new threat--the guards are incapacitated, if not dead--and sees a man in a suit and sunglasses watching him, wide-eyed. A second blast sends him curling around himself, but then he gets a hand up to block as the man rushes him. He gets the gun turned around and shoots, but the man's metal glove blocks the shot. Then the man's features realign in his vision; of course he stopped the shot--this is Iron Man. ( _Tony Stark--Howard's kid, oh fuck_.) 

Stark looks affronted that the Asset took the shot, but he lashes out with a punch quickly enough. The Asset knocks him into a table, but before he can do anything else, a blonde launches herself across the room and kicks him in the abdomen. He tosses her away, and then Romanoff is on him, thighs around his throat as he tries to strangle her with the metal hand. 

"You could at least recognize me," she gasps, and the worst part of it is that he does. The Barnes part of him, watching, knows that she has done nothing but help him. She is helping him now, keeping him from hurting anyone else. But that part of him isn't in control, can't give the smallest sign. It's a relief when another attacker punches him off of her. The Asset trades a flurry of blows with the king of Wakanda. He knocks him away and leaves--to kill him is not one of his orders. 

He is up a flight of stairs when the king leaps over them. They hit--block--hit, and the king gets a hold of the Asset's metal arm and--something resonates between his ring and the Asset's arm. For one long second they meet each other's eyes, and then the king knocks the Asset down the steps and tumbles after him. 

They fetch up against a landing, and the Asset rolls up as fast as he can, but the king is just as fast, and he catches the Asset's jaw with a punch then kicks him over the landing, and the ground is rushing up to meet him--

The Asset lands, and rolls up, a strange déjà vu memory of coming up on the rooftop across from his apartment in Bucharest--fuck, was that yesterday?-- slips away, quiet as death, because as much as he wants to take off running, he has his orders. He ghosts down a hallway and up a staircase, toward the rooftop access door, where a helicopter waits. 

He snaps the lock that binds it to the landing pad and climbs in, flipping switches. He's flown helicopters before--at the moment, he can't remember any previous instance, but that hardly matters. His muscle memory is certain, and the knowledge is just there. The imperative overrides everything else. He tilts the control to take the copter up. 

Then the rooftop door opens, and Steve is framed in it for precisely one twentieth of a second before his dumb ass runs across the roof and grabs the goddamn helicopter like the power of friendship can keep it from rising into the sky. He curls his opposite hand around a safety rail by the roof and strains his arms like his biceps can bring Bucky home. 

 _You can't save me from this_ , Barnes wants to yell, but what he wants has nothing to do with it. The Asset is driving now, and the Asset tries to bring the helicopter down on Steve, and when that doesn't work, jams the metal arm through the window to grip Steve's throat. The helicopter slides back along the roof and the Asset won't let go of Steve, and they're going to plummet to their deaths, and Steve will be just as dead as Howard, and it will be just as much Barnes's fault. The Asset wishes Steve would just kill him and prevent this, but he can no more let that happen than he can let go of Steve's neck. 

The helicopter slides back. A piece of the tail falls. Distantly, the Asset hears it hit the water. 

The helicopter slides back. Steve's pulse beats against the Asset's metal hand like a trapped bird. He cannot move his fingers, cannot release them. 

The helicopter slides back--

\--they fall--

\--they hit the water. The Asset's head slams against the windshield.

Barnes makes his fingers open, and Steve falls away into the water as his vision starbursts into black.

*

Barnes comes to consciousness. He doesn't know where he is. His metal arm is trapped in something. He turns, a thousand aches leaping to life all over his body as he does. A vise. His left arm is trapped in a vise. Somewhere outside, helicopter blades beat past.

"Hey, Cap," someone says, and memory slams into him at approximately the velocity of a helicopter hitting the water. Fuck fuck fuck _fuck_. There's a well of despair waiting for him--they stole him again, they made him their puppet again--but he can't fall into it yet, he can't. He flips his right wrist over and stares the stars marked in ink, proof that he was something besides a weapon to be pointed at anyone--at Steve, at Howard's son, at the world. He made himself, before he was broken down. It was true; it wasn't a dream; he has marked his skin in proof more trustworthy than memory.  

Footsteps run closer. He makes his best effort to pull himself together and tugs his right sleeve down against the vise. His best effort doesn't get him terribly far, and he makes a terrible squeaking noise as he tries to pull himself to a sitting position. 

Sam Wilson is there ( _he didn't really hurt him, thank god_ ) and--

"Steve," Barnes croaks. 

"Which Bucky am I talking to?" Steve says, and, _fuck_. Barnes's heart sinks to his ankles. What proof does he have to offer, besides memories he can't trust? 

"Your mom's name was Sarah." No. No good. That's in every Wikipedia article, every book. Every museum. "You used to wear newspapers in your shoes." A laugh escapes him, not so much at the memory of ill-fitting secondhand shoes, but at the absurdity of trying to provide a key to their shared past that Steve can accept. 

Steve looks at him for a moment. Barnes isn't sure if it's the memory, thin as it is, or the laugh that makes Steve finally say, "You can't read that in a museum." 

"Just like that we're supposed to be cool?" Wilson says.

"What did I do?" Barnes asks, because he thinks he knows, he thinks there are no more pits in his memory, but if the man with the words told him to forget, how the fuck would he know? 

"Enough," Steve says, and goddamn it, that's not actually helpful. But Steve would tell him if it was something else, wouldn't he? If Barnes had really done something like bomb the UN, or killed one of his friends. He doesn't think he did--he doesn't--but Howard's kid--if the glove hadn’t stopped him--

"I knew this would happen," he says instead of throwing up, because he did. This was what he's been trying to guard against. What he is incapable of stopping. "Everything Hydra put inside of me is still there. All they had to do was say the goddamn words."

"Who was he?" Steve asks. 

"I don't know."

"People are dead. The bombing, the set up--the doctor did all of that just to get ten minutes with you. I need you to do better than I don't know."  

Barnes flinches. He doesn't mean to. It's just--

Never mind. He didn't get to go to Steve. All the futures he imagined relied on him keeping himself together, and he didn't. It's as easy as that. He pulls the shattered fragments of himself together enough to say, "He wanted to know about Siberia. Where I was kept. He wanted to know exactly where." 

"Why would he need to know that?"

Barnes makes himself meet Steve's gaze. "Because I'm not the only Winter Soldier."

*

There were five of them. Barnes remembers training them, remembers their training going awry, from the perspective of his masters. He remembers...it would be inaccurate to say that the Asset felt envy. The Asset felt nothing. But the Asset couldn't join them in their revolt. The Asset was extensively trained in obedience. 

*

Objectively, they don't go nearly as far as he was taken in the truck.

Subjectively, it is a very long car ride in a very small car, with two people who don't much trust him--and how could they? There's an inescapable flaw in his system. His programmers left a back door into his brain and nothing he's done has been able to lock it. But they put him at their backs, at least. Steve trusts him not to reach over the seats and kill them. Unless they run into the man with the words.  

The blonde woman from Berlin meets them with Steve's shield and Wilson's wings, some other gear. Steve--kisses her? That is. That. Well. That is useful intelligence, he supposes. It allows him to adjust his expectations; but then, everything about the last twenty-four hours has adjusted his expectations. He twists his mouth into an approximation of a smile as Steve looks back at the car. 

"Really, Rogers?" Wilson says when Steve gets back in the car, and Steve flushes so hard even the backs of his ears turn red.  

"It's not really like that," he says, but doesn't define the parameters of 'that,' and neither Wilson nor Barnes ask. 

They stop again in an empty parking deck by the Leipzig/Halle Airport to meet with Steve's reinforcements against the other Soldiers: Barnes recognizes Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch, but not the new guy who blatantly (and awkwardly) ogles Steve's chest. There's a helicopter, Hawkeye says, to get them to Siberia

"We should get moving," Barnes says, right before a speaker announces that the airport is being evacuated. Tony Stark. Howard's kid, that Barnes tried to kill the day before. 

"Suit up," Steve says, and they do. 

*

Stark hits the helicopter with an EMP. That's not good, but Barnes is pretty sick of helicopters anyway. He and Wilson locate the quinjet Stark and his friends came on, but before they can get to it, there's a fight. 

There's always a fight. 

Barnes isn't thrilled about fighting a child, but the kid stops a punch from his metal arm, so maybe he doesn't need to worry about this particular kid. 

All of Steve's friends are fighting each other, and while this is happening, the man with the words could be in Siberia right now. The soldiers Barnes remembers are a deadly force, and they're wasting time with this. 

The king of Wakanda attacks Barnes. "I didn't kill your father," Barnes says. 

"Then why did you run?" the king asks. 

 _Because you were trying to rip my face off_ , Barnes thinks but doesn't say. They trade punches, and the king has him, his claws are at Barnes's throat, but the Scarlet Witch saves him and flings the king away. He catches her eye and she nods; it's been a long time since anyone saved him but Steve. 

In the end, it's a sacrifice play; the rest of them engage so that Steve and Barnes can get to the jet and get to Siberia before it's too late. They almost don't make it, but Romanoff comes through. Barnes thinks, _she always does_. He hopes he gets the chance to tell her so. 

Iron Man and the other flying robot guy are on their tail, and then they're not. Wilson and the others must have stopped them.

Now it's just him and Steve, flying toward another fight. Maybe after this it will be over.

Somehow, he doubts it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bucky saying stop as Zemo strips away his autonomy is so hard to watch. 
> 
> I waffled back and forth over Steve and Sharon's stupid kiss, but decided to stick to canon once again since I've done it so far, so I feel like I need to say that even though the MCU never addressed this awkward bullshit again, I'm going to! Sharon deserved better than being shoehorned in as Steve's love interest and then vanished from the MCU entirely. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
> 
> Next time: Steve and Barnes alone and not in imminent peril for the first time in 70 years. You'd best believe they're going to talk about more shit than a double date they went on in the thirties.


	19. (a land strapped by hunger, a bellyful of weeds)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes and Steve go to Siberia. Things get catastrophic.

The quinjet flies steadily north and east, crossing vast swathes of land with Steve at the helm, Barnes seated behind him. The silence is not exactly uncomfortable, but it is heavy by the time Barnes breaks it. 

"What's going to happen to your friends?" 

Steve turns to look over his shoulder. "Whatever it is, I'll deal with it."

Barnes has to swallow before he can speak the thought that has been plaguing him. "I don't know if I'm worth all this, Steve."

Friend fighting friend. Steve's break with Tony Stark. The two years Steve spent chasing him. Barnes is a shadow version of the man Steve knew, and he however much he doesn't want to be a weapon, anyone with the right words can turn him to their purpose. Turn him against Steve. The last thing he ever wanted to do was hurt Steve again, and yet here they are. 

"What you did all those years, it wasn't you. You didn't have a choice." A muscle clenches in Steve's jaw. Maybe he too is thinking of the helicarrier, the elevator shaft in Berlin that Barnes pushed him down.

"I know," Barnes says, "but I did it."

And that is inarguable. The two of them are quiet again. Barnes wishes he had his journals with him. There is going to come a point where they are not poised on the edge of action, and at that point the thoughts and feelings he is holding back are going to come due. If he lives through this, he is going to have a hell of a time coming back to where he was. It is ridiculous to think of Prague and Bucharest as more innocent times when he was trying to reconcile what he has done to who he wants to be, and yet. He slides back the arm of the tactical jacket, the kevlar stiff against his skin, until he can see the stars on his wrist, rub his metal thumb over them. Two years, and he was naïve enough to wish for a constellation. He was lucky to get two. 

When he looks up, Steve is watching him over his shoulder. Barnes wonders what his own face is doing. 

"Can I see?" Steve says. Wordlessly Barnes extends his right arm forward. Steve takes his hand, the leather glove cooler than the warmth of his fingers, and doesn't-quite-touch the ink with the forefinger of his other hand. "You sent pictures of these to me." It's not quite a question. 

"I got them on the anniversaries." Barnes's throat feels thick. He has not been clear; the furrow in the center of Steve's forehead is deepening. "The helicarriers fell. And I was free." He takes a breath. "To try to become a person again. That's the anniversary I marked. It felt significant." 

"You always were a person." Steve lets go of his wrist. His skin cools in the absence of Steve's hand. "You sent me the photos." 

Barnes sits back. He can't look at Steve and say this. He watches mountains speed by below them instead. "I wanted to come to you."

"Why didn't you?" Steve's voice is barely a whisper.

"I'm not who I used to be, Steve. I had to--you can say I was always a person, but I had to set a fucking timer to remind myself to eat. I had to relearn how to sleep. I had to teach myself how to talk to people again. I know I could have come to you like that, but I was a fucking mess. I wanted to be all right before I did." Barnes swallows.

"I would have helped," Steve says. "I would have tried."

"I didn't want you to have to." Barnes makes himself look at Steve's three-quarters profile in the pilot's seat. His eyelashes have always been ridiculously long. He is only now questioning whether he ought to look. There is more Barnes could say. He could try to put into words the longing he has felt, the way he has made Steve the north on his compass, but...Somehow, all this time, he never doubted his right to do so, never doubted that Steve was his end goal, the home where he would eventually come to rest.

The physical presence of Steve, actual person with needs and wants of his own, has Barnes second guessing himself. The real Steve might not want to be the shore Barnes washes up on. The real Steve has spent the years Barnes has taken to rebuild himself doing other things with other people. Take the blonde from Germany, just as a random example. There are pieces of himself that Barnes has assigned to Steve without considering whether Steve wants them. His memories are not a good guide; they are incomplete.

Barnes sighs, but he tries to do it quietly.

"I would have thought needles might be a problem," Steve says, in another not-question. 

"Yeah. The first one, I went to a woman. Not too many women were handlers. So I kept going to women, and then I learned how to do it myself." He taps the outlined star with his thumb. "I did the last one." 

"Buck." Steve sounds almost scandalized. "How many tattoos do you have?" 

Barnes has to think about it. "Six."

Steve cranes his neck to look back at him. "I don't even know what to--six?" 

"Five, if you count the stars on my wrist as one." 

Even in profile, Barnes can see Steve's forehead wrinkle. "Wait, you did the last one yourself?" 

Barnes looks down. "Yes. I've been working at a tattoo shop for a while now. There's people out there with ink I put on 'em." 

"Shit. That was your job? You had a job?"

Barnes laughs, surprising himself. "Not always. But for the last while, yeah." And then, because it's always been easy for him to talk to Steve, especially if he wasn't trying to say anything important, he tells him about Prague. About Bucharest. About making a small place for himself in the world. He doesn't go too deep into the why of it. He doesn't talk about the lists he's made, or trying to reclaim his personhood. He doesn't talk about following Steve to New York after Sokovia. He just tells him about the places he carved out for himself: the small apartments, the routines he made, the connections he tried to foster instead of ignore. 

Steve's a good listener. He always has been. He asks questions, actually listens to the answers. When Barnes is sick of talking about himself, he asks Steve about New York and the Avengers. And Steve tells him: about what he does there, about going to the park, running with Wilson, all the different kinds of food he's tried. The way Romanoff has become an actual friend. And maybe that's why she helped Barnes so much, for Steve; but he doesn't tell Steve that, either. The impulse to open his mouth and spill his guts about everything is there, just below the surface, because if there was ever anyone he wanted to know everything about him, it's Steve, but now, just before they go into an uncertain, volatile combat situation is not the time. _Maybe_ , Barnes thinks, _when it's over_. 

At least by the time they close on the coordinates Barnes gave Steve, the atmosphere between them is easier than it has been since this whole shitshow started in Bucharest. Steve takes the jet down by a bunker that is much as Barnes remembers it, with the addition of a truck, recently enough driven that the tracks behind it haven't filled in with snow. Barnes arms himself. 

The ramp lowers onto a landscape in shades of white. Bitingly cold wind blows into the jet. Barnes remembers the feel of it, the ache where his metal arm joins the flesh of his body and sucks the warmth of his body away. 

"Remember that time we had to ride back from Rockaway Beach in the back of a freezer truck?" Steve says. 

"Was that the time you used our train money to buy hot dogs?" Barnes can remember it; not all of it, but enough. He remembers laughter. He remembers biting into the hot sausage, the taste of it; a smear of grease to the side of Steve's mouth. He'd wanted to wipe it away, but they were old enough that he couldn't. Steve might see too clearly the things Bucky hadn't wanted to admit to. But it was fun despite that, and Bucky wasn't indignant about the hot dogs, because...

"You blew three bucks trying to win that stuffed bear for a redhead." They're both smiling now, maybe both simply pleased that they can share this memory.

"What was her name again?"

"Dolores. You called her Dot."

It's been so long, anyone might have forgotten, not just former assassins with repeatedly electrocuted brains. "She's gotta be a hundred years old now."

"So are we, pal." Steve reaches over and lays a hand on Barnes's shoulder, squeezes. This is familiar more than any one memory could be. His body remembers this gesture from both sides. He catches Steve's eye, and maybe his face does something weird, maybe he shows the weight of all the things he's not telling Steve, because Steve's expression changes into one Barnes can't quite read. Then Steve claps him on the shoulder, and it's time to move. 

Once they get to the ground, it's clear that it's not entirely as Barnes remembers. The man with the words--Zemo--has left the front door wide open. 

"He can't have been here more than a few hours," Steve murmurs. 

Barnes taps the stock of his gun with his fingertip. "Long enough to wake them up." But if it a trap--and it most certainly is--what does it matter? They can't leave it unsprung, can't leave Zemo with the other Soldiers. 

There's nothing much to the ground floor of the facility; they have to take the elevator down into the bowels of the earth to find the floor where the Soldiers are kept. Barnes stares at Steve as the elevator descends, his heart rate higher than baseline. _Pre-action nerves_ , he thinks; Steve stares back, and as on the jet, Barnes can't read him. He nods, not for any other reason than he needs to break eye contact before he blurts out something, anything; and then the elevator reaches its nadir. 

He goes first into the room, sweeping the corners with his gun and clearing them. Steve follows, shield at the ready. It's when Barnes is almost to the top of a short flight of stairs that they hear metal complaining behind them. Steve whirls and Barnes is with him, moving as one to get the shield up and Barnes's gun trained on the door behind them. 

"Ready?" Steve says. 

"Yeah." Barnes's gun doesn't move at all, braced on his metal arm. The doors creak open, to reveal--

Stark? 

Stark walks in, tells Barnes to stand down. Barnes does not, even when Stark says that he too now believes that Barnes was not behind the bombing in Vienna, and that he is here without Ross's knowledge. Barnes does not stand down until Steve agrees with Stark that it's okay. He doesn't have enough information to judge, but Steve does. It is a cautious relief to have another ally, though, once Steve has given approval; the Soldiers are not to be trifled with, not even for him or Steve. 

When they find the room with the cryo cells for the Soldiers, Stark only senses one heat signature. It's enough to send Barnes's hackles into the air. Even worse, lights come up in the cryo tubes without any input from his group. And then a voice over an intercom says, "If it's any consolation, they died in their sleep," and Barnes sees the bullet holes in the foreheads of the dead Soldiers.

They were not good people. They volunteered for what was done to him against his will. The serum had magnified Steve's goodness, Schmidt's evil, and who knows what in himself; in these five, it made them more deadly, cut more of their humanity away. But they had been people once, regardless of their goodness, and they turned and bit the hand that fed them, and the Asset had once wished that he could do the same. It would be inaccurate to say that Barnes mourns them, but he can't help feeling they had deserved something other than this.

"Did you really think I wanted more of you?" Zemo says. 

And no, the answer is no. But Barnes can't see the shape of the trap they're walking into if the Soldiers are dead, and that disturbs him far more than the bodies in their cryo coffins. "What the hell," he mutters, and clutches his firearm closer, because what is the trap? 

Zemo keeps talking--Barnes already knows he likes the sound of his own voice--saying that the Soldiers brought them here, Vienna brought them here. That he is Sokovian; _the fucking robots_ , Barnes thinks. That Steve will know loss such as Zemo has known. 

Then a video starts playing, and Barnes knows. He knows what he did to Howard. He knows what he did to Howard's son, before he even knew he existed. He knows why Zemo brought them all here. He knows why the Soldiers are dead.

The video keeps playing, and then Stark knows too. The recording is grainy, but Barnes's memory provides Howard calling him by name. The feel of Maria's throat against his flesh hand. Barnes wants to throw up. 

Stark asks if Steve knew. When Steve says yes, Stark lashes out: a punch to Steve's perfect jaw. Barnes shoots and--

Well, it's tits up from there. 

Steve tries to get him away, multiple times, but Stark is having none of it. Barnes almost reaches the top of the facility, but Stark crushes it down on him. Then Stark and Barnes fight, then Steve and Stark until-- _christ_ \--Stark uses a repulsor blast to knock Steve over. Steve is lying on snow on the ground. Stark isn't pulling his punches anymore, if he ever was, and his fist in the suit cracks concrete next to Steve's face.

Well, fuck that. The shield is on the walkway next to Barnes. He scoops it up and falls on Stark from above. It's distracts him long enough for Barnes to sling the shield to Steve, and then-- 

It's like fucking music, a song they're singing each other: throwing the shield from Steve to him and back again, around Stark. It's like a language no one else knows, the words the motions of their bodies. It's like flinging himself from roof to roof in Bucharest, only better; it's not just the limits of his own body he's testing, but the way Steve's works with his. 

Until Stark hits Steve with a repulsor blast, and that's a fuck of a wrong note. 

Barnes attacks. He doesn't hold back. He takes several punches to the face, but it doesn't matter. Stark keeps shooting the repulsor and it rips a line through the cement wall like it's nothing, so what did it do to Steve? All Barnes knows is that he can't let Stark hurt Steve any worse. He has to keep him away. He finally gets in a solid punch with his left arm and follows through immediately, pinning Stark to the wall. His right hand keeps his face in place; his left goes straight for the arc reactor on Stark's chest, because without that, he won't be able to use the repulsors.

Barnes is only vaguely aware of the sounds coming out of his own mouth, desperate, animal noises as he scrabbles for the energy source. The casing on the reactor cracks--Stark arches his chest--a blast of energy knocks Barnes back and away, accompanied by a surge of pain feedback from his left arm so intense he is only able to silently gape for a moment. When he cranes his head his metal arm is--

\--gone, it's _gone_ , it fucking hurts--

\--and then a new source of pain. Fire blooms across his back, as something ( _repulsor blast_ , some part of his brain fills in) knocks him ass over teakettle, away from the fight. He lies still for what feels like too long, trying to work around the pain in his back, in his arm, oh christ. _Get up, help Steve, get up_ , he tells himself. He can hear Stark's blasts hitting the shield. Steve needs him. 

The sound of the blasts dies away, and it sounds like Steve and Stark are just punching the shit out of each other. By the time they get close to Barnes, Stark has tossed away Steve's shield. Stark has him on the ropes: thrown into a concrete pylon, bleeding, not to mention the injuries Barnes can't see. 

"I can do this all day," Steve says. Stark's repulsor whines to life. All Barnes can reach is Stark's ankle, so he grabs it. Stark rewards him with a kick to the face and a new starburst of pain behind his eyes, but it's enough for Steve to get the jump on him. Steve punches the faceplate right off the suit, then grabs the shield. Stark puts his hands up to defend his face--Steve would decapitate him if that's what he was aiming for, but he's not. He hits the arc reactor and it cracks. The suit falls silent, and the only sounds that are left are Steve and Stark's panting breaths. 

Steve pulls the shield out of Stark's chest and stands. He pulls Barnes up, and Barnes manages to get his remaining arm over Steve's shoulder. Every piece of him aches. 

"That shield doesn't belong to you," Stark says. "You don't deserve it. My father made that shield." 

Steve lets it fall. The sound it makes as it lands seems much louder than it should be. 

*

That T'Challa takes them in surprises Barnes. 

He and Steve stumble out of the bunker, broken and leaning on each other, to find the king of Wakanda waiting for them, Zemo already captured and bound on his plane. 

"There will be justice for what he did," the king says, taking in the state of the two of them; and he turns to Barnes. "I would have killed you, and my father's killer would have gone free." 

"Maybe you should have." Steve's shoulders tense under Barnes's arm, but he doesn't look at Steve. "It would have stopped all of this." 

The king's dark eyes bore into Barnes's. "There is a place for you--for both of you--in Wakanda, if you wish it." 

"Why?" Steve says. "We're going to be fugitives now." 

"Not from me," the king says. 

"I didn't kill your father." Barnes winces as another shock of pain radiates from his left shoulder. "But I did kill a lot of other people." 

"I know," the king says. "But I have just had reason to think on the difference between vengeance and justice. How much of the latter do you think you will find anywhere else?" He tilts his chin at Barnes's arm. "Besides, no one else can help you with that the way we can."

The flight to Wakanda is mostly a symphony of pain and exhaustion. Barnes feels unbalanced without his arm. Maybe it should be a familiar sensation, but he doesn't really remember it. He only has vague sensations of terrible pain, a memory that's barely more than a flash of images: his stump leaving a blood trail in the snow. Maybe it hurts less this time. It wasn't his own flesh that Stark blasted off him, but his nerves were wired into the arm to make it work. It's integrated with his spine, part of his body after all this time, and perhaps the quality of the hurt is different, but he still feels it. By the time they land in Birnin Zana, Barnes's back has started to heal, but even his enhanced body doesn't know what to do about his shoulder, and he is on the edge of collapse. Steve is not much better; further along in healing, but exhausted in a way Barnes knows is as much emotional as physical. 

T'Challa sends Steve somewhere to rest, hopefully, but Barnes he takes to his sister's lab. 

*

The doctors do what they can with his battered body, cap the remains of his arm. And then Shuri comes to see him. 

She takes scans of his arm, scans of his brain, talking a mile a minute. She might be the smartest person he's ever met. She's already talking about another arm when he stops her. 

"Did your brother tell you who I am? Did he tell you what happened in Berlin?" 

She shoots him a quick look. "Enough of it, yes."

"I've got these--that man. Zemo. He had these words. They made me obey him." He swallows past the knot in his throat. "I want to get rid of them." 

"Trigger words." She rotates the bead on her wrist thoughtfully. "I can find out how to be rid of them for you."

"More than the arm, that's what I want," he says.

"There's time for all of it." She smiles at him. "Now rest." 

*

When he wakes up, Steve isn't there. 

The quiet-voiced woman who brings him clean clothes and shows him where to get something to eat tells him, "Captain Rogers had to follow up on a few things. He will return to Birnin Zana as soon as he is able." 

Barnes thinks he knows what Steve is doing. His friends who helped them have suffered for helping. Steve won't let that lie. 

Barnes eats mechanically and returns to the room where he woke up. And then it hits. 

Everything that he has been holding back crashes over him and through him. The loss of autonomy, the blood on his hands; some of it that of his allies. Steve's friends turned against him, because of Barnes. The loss of his life in Bucharest, which was perhaps not much, but had been his. Coming to Steve under a cloud of suspicion and violence instead of in his own time and on his own terms.

He curls up into a ball on the bed and lets himself feel all of it. His body shakes with it. How can emotions wring him dry so powerfully? He is exhausted all over again by the time it is done, his face wet and his throat sore, though he hasn't made a sound. He washes and dries his face. 

Then he asks to see T'Challa.

*

Steve doesn't want him to do it. He knows that. T'Challa has reservations as well. Shuri looked at him like he was an idiot--although that is Shuri's baseline look, truthfully, at least at him--and said, "Won't you at least wait until your face heals?" 

He can't. He is sick with what he has done and what he has failed to do. He is sick of feeling like this. He has built himself up from a trainwreck before, but the thought of doing it again makes him so tired. And the words are still there.

"You sure about this?" Steve has been watching from the corner while the doctor rewrapped Barnes's broken knuckles after checking the healing, but he steps forward now, perhaps ready to go through his arguments again

"I can't trust my own mind. So until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head, I think going under is the best thing." Barnes takes a breath, thinks about Steve's friends, the life he's built, what place there might be for himself in it. "For everybody." 

Steve just nods as the doctors prep the cryo chamber. It's very different from the ones he's known. Shuri walked him through how it works, what it will feel like. 

Steve leaves the room. Barnes knows that if he turned his head, he could see him through the observation window, but he doesn't. That one small pain he can deny himself. 

He closes his eyes, and cold drags him down into welcome oblivion. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is modified from ["Not From This Anger"](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/dylan_thomas/poems/11424) by Dylan Thomas. 
> 
> This chapter got very long. SORRY. (not sorry? I don't even know.) I could have broken it up, but I wanted to get through Civil War. Next chapter is going to be focused on what Barnes does after he wakes up in Wakanda.


	20. (the thing with feathers)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes gets a little help with his brain, and a chance to talk to Steve when no one's trying to kill them.

Barnes only met Scarlet Witch briefly in Germany, and almost immediately she saved him from T'Challa's claws. Now she's going to help him again. He wishes he knew why.

Her name is Wanda. 

Between Shuri and Wanda he feels old in a way he never has before, even when the weight of all his crimes and nightmares has crushed him flat. This is not the burden of his past. This is a language constructed of internet memes and popular culture and shared vocabulary that he doesn't possess, because Shuri can speak in scientific jargon that she has to break down for him, but she also speaks in _big mood_ and _uwu_ and _they're good dogs Brent_. Mostly she and Wanda take pity on him, but sometimes they leave him mystified. 

But what they want him to do isn't that complicated. It's a form of deconditioning, and it sounds so much better than the conditioning that put the words there in the first place. They're going to break the trigger words by desensitizing him to them, which he fully expects to be just as fun as it sounds. Only instead of doing it in real life, Wanda is going to walk him through it in the privacy of his own mind where she can pull him back if he gets too far. It should sound like woo woo bullshit, but fuck, he's seen what she can do physically with her powers; it isn't that much of a stretch to think that she could reach inside his head. The only thing he wants to be sure of is that she can't see what else is in there. She doesn't need to see that shit. 

"I won't look at anything you don't want me to," she promises.

"I don't want you to see any of it," he mutters. "But thanks for doing it." 

They're not in Shuri's lab for this--or at least, not the part of Shuri's lab he's familiar with. This is more like a break room. Big overstuffed chairs, a long couch, soft rugs on the floor--and watching, T'Challa in his Black Panther suit. Barnes's insistence, not that T'Challa had disagreed at all. If this goes at all wrong, he wants the enhanced guy in the vibranium clothes keeping him away from the young women. Not that either is defenseless--but even without his arm, he's not sure what he might be capable of if Hydra's left any traps in his brain. 

Wanda puts him on the couch and tells him to get comfortable. He does his best--this is not a comfortable situation, and no amount of soft cushions are going to make it so--but collapses into a heap of horrific memories and two-hundred-plus-or-minus pounds of supersoldier anyway. Shuri has scanners that don't have to touch him at all watching his brain, and Wanda sits across from him. 

Barnes is holding still as ever he did when he was setting up a shot. "What do I need to do?" His voice sounds a little strangled but no one here will care. 

"Close your eyes." He does, leans back, and lets himself go limp.

Behind his eyelids, he sees red. It's a comfort; that way he knows it's Wanda. 

 _I'm here_ , she says, and it takes him a moment to pinpoint why her mental voice is so different from how she sounds to his ears. 

Wanda's speaking voice is so calm--always, even when she and Shuri are trading memes to his bemusement (about his bemusement, sometimes)--that it's a surprise to feel the roil of her emotions. He gets more of it, perhaps, than she means to share with him in the first instant of their thoughts running up against each other: he sees a man with bleached-pale hair ( _brother, beloved brother; gone_ ); he sees a bald man with a strange monocle in one eye, clouded with black shadows and the memory of injections, of pain, before she whisks him away; he sees a series of cages she has been kept in, including the one Steve just broke her out of, and he wants to wrap her in his arm, put himself between her and anyone who would put her in a cage ever again. He knows loss; he knows pain; he knows imprisonment, and it's too late to spare her any of it, but he wants to keep any more of it from touching her. He knows that's not how it works. 

He focuses very hard on locking down as much of the horror show of his past as he can, but it must leave too much of the present showing, because he feels a sensation like a hand grabbing his and her voice saying, _Does Steve know how you feel?_ and then, immediately, _Sorry! It's not my business._

 _It's all right_. He forms the thought slowly and deliberately, because he now knows intimately that he can trust her with this. With just about anything. It's so strange, knowing this without any intermediate stages of friendship or even acquaintance, but there it is. He has seen the fires she was forged in, the grief that tempered her, and he can feel her good will surrounding him. _And--no. He doesn't._  

 _I'm still sorry. I didn't mean to pry_. Her remorse feels cool and silver. _It's not why we're here._   

 _No. It isn't._ He braces himself. _Let's get it over with._ The feeling that she has taken his hand intensifies. He lets it pull him forward.

A door opens and he walks into a room. It's an empty dance hall, chairs pushed to the walls and a bar in the back of the hall. The floorboards creak a little under his bare feet, the wood rough, scarred by countless dancing feet. He holds his hands out in wonder: two of them, both flesh and bone and blood. He turns, and Wanda is next to him. 

She asked him if he wanted to use the memory of Zemo saying the words, or something from further back in his past. He'd chosen Zemo on the basis that there were fewer horrors for her to wade through to get to that memory. This may have been a tactical error. Zemo stands on the stage at the other end of the dance hall, where a band would perform, lit by a spotlight. Barnes's knows this isn't really his body, but his mouth feels dry regardless.

Wanda turns to him. "Are you ready?" It's a good simulation, or whatever this is; her voice echoes around the room. 

He squares his shoulders and faces the stage. "As I can be." 

And Zemo speaks. 

Barnes had not forgotten what it was like to feel his own will drain away, but even as little time as it's been since Berlin, the sharp edges of his terror had dimmed. It all comes rushing back. His breathing speeds, his heart beats a staccato rhythm, and even knowing that it is imaginary doesn't ward away the sensation. He tries to focus on an image the way Shuri and Wanda had suggested: him resisting, even so much as twitching an eyebrow or lifting one finger. Anything that prevents him from being utterly under the control of the words. 

Zemo finishes speaking and orders him to stay still. Barnes falls backward into the blankness of Asset-space, and his mouth is bitter with despair. He can no more move a finger than he could when this happened in real life. But Wanda doesn't let him plummet into darkness; fingers of red slide around him and pull him back to control of himself. 

He shudders, cold sweat all over him--it doesn't matter whether it's real or not. He is standing in the empty dance hall, Wanda next to him, and Zemo is nothing more than a mannequin on stage, staring blankly out at his audience of two. "Fuck," Barnes says.

"Are you okay?" He has to look at her from the corner of his eye, because he can't give his back to the man on the stage, even though he isn't real. 

"I want to try again." 

And they do. Barnes can't keep track of how many times he loses himself to the Asset. Wanda never lets him fall all the way, but he is exhausted by the constant fear of it. She asks every time if he wants to keep going, and every time he says he does.

It's the second day before Barnes can so much as twitch a finger, but then he does it: taps his pointer finger against his pants leg twice. Wanda rips him out of Asset-space immediately. 

"You did it!" She throws her arms around him, and he swings her around like she's his date in 1936, and she shrieks with laughter. 

"Lot further to go, though," he says once her feet are on the floor again. 

"Well, yeah." She pushes her hair back behind her ears and smiles at him. "But you'll get there."

Day five of Barnes's attempts with Wanda leaves him wrung flat but able to move further in contravention to his orders; even better, the words are starting to sound--less powerful. He hears them knowing he can rebel, even if only a little, and that reduces the fear that they've always held for him. Once they've tamed the words in here, they'll test it with the words outside, in the room where T'Challa still comes to make sure Barnes doesn't do anything hinky while he and Wanda are poking around his brain. Shuri has rolled her eyes about it more than once, but Barnes and T'Challa agree. Better safe than sorry. 

He retreats after their daily session. The work is in his mind, but his body is tired when they are done. He is not actually sweaty, but he feels like he should be, so he goes back to his rooms in the palace to take a shower. He stays for a long time under the hot water. It doesn't actually wash anything away, but it feels good. And after battling his brain weasels, he wants to feel good. 

He finally steps out. He's getting better at wrapping a towel around his hips one-handed. His shoulders are something close to relaxed when he walks out into the main room of his suite, thinking of nothing more than whether he might order from the restaurant down the street that he likes, or whether Shuri has made any progress on the arm they've talked about. 

Then someone clears his throat, and Barnes whirls, taking in every possible weapon into account, but as soon as he faces the door, he settles; it's Steve. Steve is sitting at the little table where Barnes eats his breakfast most days. There's a spectacular view of Birnin Zana down the hill from the palace, but his eyes are fixed on Barnes. 

It's not much of a view. Steve's gaze catches first on the join of his metal shoulder to his body, but of course he's seen that before, at least in glimpses, when the doctors capped the mess Stark made of the metal arm. His gaze skips and starts over the masses of scar tissue and lands on Barnes's sternum.

Barnes wishes he had a shirt. Pants. A fucking sheet wrapped around himself. Anything. But it's too late for any of that; Steve's looking right at the tattoo on Barnes's chest. Barnes wishes futilely that he hadn't marked his every desire right there on his skin. 

"Hey Steve," he manages to croak. "Didn't know you were coming back today." 

Steve has looked better. There's soot and blood on his tactical gear--not a uniform exactly, not anymore; he's ripped the star right off of it. _Dramatic_ , Barnes thinks, and it feels like a memory. There's a healing wound on his forehead, a gash surrounded by a bruise already faded green. Fine blond stubble catches the light along his jaw, a couple of shades darker than his hair. But his eyes are the worst; the same blue they ever were, the shadows beneath them darker than his bruises. 

"Shuri said you were awake." Steve's voice is not much better than Barnes's own, rough with fatigue or something else. Barnes's pulse thuds a steady, too-fast beat along his throat. He swallows. 

"Yeah. 'Bout a week, now." 

"I should have been here." And if that isn't the Steve-est kind of guilt bullshit, Barnes doesn't know what is. 

"You had stuff to do. I get it." Barnes shakes his head. "Gimme a second. I'll get some clothes on." 

Steve stands up fast. "Wait. Before you do--can I see?" 

Barnes makes an abortive movement toward his chest, then lets his hand fall to the side and squares his shoulders. "Yeah, go ahead." 

Steve walks over fast, stops just out of arms' reach. The furrow between his brows gets deeper as he looks. Steve asked for this, and he said he would give it, so he makes himself stand still and not hide. "These are my dogtags," Steve finally says. There's a very odd note in his voice. 

"Yeah." Barnes holds his arm out, twists it so Steve can see his initials and army service number. "I already put my information here. So if I ever forget again it'll be right there to remind me." He makes himself look at Steve's face, but Steve has gone back to looking at the tags tattooed on Barnes's sternum.  Barnes feels naked in a way that can't be explained by how much skin is on display, although that isn't helping. A drop of water falls from the end of his hair and makes a slow trail down his chest. He's afraid if he reaches up to flick it away he'll lose his towel. Steve catches sight of it and takes the smallest inhaled breath. Barnes can't move. Every millimeter of him is aware of every millimeter of Steve. 

"You said you have five," Steve says, his voice still hoarse. 

Barnes leans back against the door frame and angles his leg so Steve can see his calf. "This counts as two. I had the stars done first and I did the line later." 

"A star with a shadow," Steve says slowly, "over infinity." 

Barnes sets his leg down steady and stands up off the wall. "Yeah. A star." He points at Steve. "A shadow." He points at himself. "A line with no end to get to." He shrugs. 

"Jesus, Buck," Steve breathes. Barnes doesn't know how to interpret what he sees on his face. 

"I'm gonna--clothes." His skin is going to twitch off his body if Steve keeps looking at him like that. Steve nods. "Be here when I come back?" He can't help making it a question. 

"Yeah," Steve says, and finally steps back. Barnes sidles away to his room. 

Has he ever been so simultaneously relieved and disappointed to armor himself against the world? When he pulls the loose white shirt over the betraying marks he gave himself, he almost regrets the loss of Steve's eyes tracing over his skin. He's already given himself away, after all. But none of that means Steve wants the way he does. He pulls on jeans and towels his hair from sopping to merely heavily damp and runs a comb through it. Without Shuri or Wanda to help him pull it back, it'll have to stay loose. 

Unless he asks Steve. He jams a hair tie in his pocket. Maybe. Depends on how the conversation goes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two pals havin' a chat.
> 
> The chapter title is from Emily Dickenson's ["'Hope' Is the Thing With Feathers"](https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/poetry_in_motion/atlas/newyork/hop_is_the_thi_wit_fea/)


	21. Tags, Revisited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes and Steve have a chat; Steve makes a decision.

Steve is back at the kitchen table again, but he's peeled off his uniform jacket and washed his hands and face. He's got on a blue shirt, sized about typical for what Barnes has seen of him this century--like he bought it for his former self--and his uniform pants. He took off his boots and socks, too, and his bare feet look vulnerable against the floor. Barnes still can't quite read his face, but maybe he will relearn Steve's expressions. Maybe he can start now.

"Hi," he says, and Steve makes a sound adjacent to a laugh. 

Barnes walks closer, intending to sit, and Steve stands up again. Barnes stops, unsure. Steve raises his hands, fingers opening. Unthreatening. Inviting, even. "With everything going on," Steve says, "we never got a chance to--can I--?" He spreads his arms wider, and Barnes walks into them, because that's an invitation he can't refuse, not this time. He wraps his arm around Steve's waist and tucks his head into his neck and breathes. Steve smells like the flowers and lemons of the soap at Barnes's sink, and beneath that, faintly, smoke and blood; but most of all, he smells like himself, and it goes straight to the oldest parts of Barnes's brain, the parts that remember Steve smaller. 

Steve's hands meet on Barnes's back and pull him close, a tight squeeze that doesn't feel at all like Steve is trying to constrain him. It feels like Steve is getting something from him, like he's supporting Steve. It's a ridiculous notion, but he likes it. 

"I missed you," Steve says into his hair. 

"I missed you too, pal." Barnes pulls him closer with his one hand and sighs against Steve's shirt. "Wanda and Shuri have been helping me with the trigger words. They're not gone yet, but we're getting there." 

"That's good." 

"Yeah. I didn't." Barnes exhales more sharply this time. "I never wanted to hurt you again. And your friends. That's not..." He makes himself push away from Steve, but not far. "I didn't want to."

"I know." Steve scans his face. "They do too, Buck." 

"Not Stark," Barnes says softly. 

Steve sets his shoulders. "Yeah, well. He's got to do what he thinks is best, and so do I. I've left him a way to get in contact, but that's up to him." 

"What are you going to do now?" Barnes makes himself ask. 

"There's still a lot of threats out there." Steve tilts his chin toward the table and Barnes shrugs and follows him to it. They sit down, and Steve folds his hands carefully together. "I've got some of my team. T'Challa's going to let us operate out of here, I guess, like a base. If we want. But Buck, I'd only do that if you want. It's your refuge before it's any of ours, and I don't want to...if we keep coming back here, there's more of a risk that someone else might realize you're here."

"If Wanda keeps helping me with the words, it doesn't matter." Steve looks up at that, eyes sharp. "If they can't control me, let 'em come. Besides, have you seen the Dora Milaje? I'm not worried." 

"Good," Steve says. "But do you--you'd still be tattooing people in Bucharest if it wasn't for all of this. Do you want us to--do you want _me_ to--"

"Steve." Barnes's throat is dry. He wants so badly not to fuck this up. Once upon a time he would have known exactly what to say and how to say it, but he's not that man anymore. "Yeah. I didn't want it to happen like this. I wanted to come to you, but I'm glad you're here now." _Glad_ is a pallid word, but it will have to do, because if he tries to get more specific, all the other words might come dumping out and there's the other thing he has to say. "But before, you were with your friends in New York. You had a life and all this fucked it up. I'm sorry." 

Steve stares at him. "What I wanted most the last two years is to find you. I don't really give a shit about the rest of it." 

And the thing is, Barnes believes him, because he recognizes the set of Steve's jaw, has seen it square up like that for so long that not all the chairs in the world could erase the memory of it. Tension he hadn't known he was carrying uncoils from his spine. 

"You tattooed my tags on your chest," Steve says, and a different kind of tension jolts through his gut. 

"Yeah, well. You were already there."

"I don't--Buck, you gotta tell me what you mean when you say stuff like that." Steve's got the best earnest stare of anyone Barnes has ever met. 

He sighs, because, well. Cards on the table and all that. They almost died in Siberia. Before that, when Steve let a city fall on him in Sokovia, Barnes had thought about missed opportunities and second chances and he's not so completely stupid that he'll let it go again. If Steve is going to be off running missions and saving the world, there's always the chance he might not come back. If that happens, then at least Barnes will know he corrected the misapprehension that he stayed away from Steve because he didn't care. 

"Even when I didn't remember you, I knew you. You were right, in Bucharest. I lied." Steve smiles a little, vindicated. "Because I didn't know who else was listening over your comms." 

Steve's smile flattens back out. "Oh. Well, that's reasonable--" 

"I don't remember everything, and I might not ever, but the one thing I've always been sure of is that you're the most important person to me. Before the war, during the war, now. Even when everything else was gone, I had you. So that's why..." He taps his chest where his pulse is thumping as though he's been exerting himself. 

Steve's eyes are a little shiny, maybe. "Buck..." 

Barnes shakes his head. He's not finished. "But also. The blonde girl, from Germany. Are you...?" 

Steve's jaw squares up again. "No."

Well, that's valuable intel.  

"Okay. There's something I never told you. I was afraid to. You don't have to--to do anything, or feel anything you don't. I just want you to know--in case." Barnes makes himself take a breath because Steve is frowning in incomprehension. Why is this so difficult. "You've always been my best friend. And I always loved you."

Steve flushes a little. "Well, yeah, Buck. I love you too." 

"No." Steve looks faintly offended. Christ, he's going to have to spell it out, isn't he? "I mean, you're my best friend, but also I always wanted--I woulda liked to take you dancing and brought you back to my place, and then stayed with you forever." 

"Jesus." Steve's eyes are intent on his. Barnes can't read his expression. His pulse thrums in his wrist like a desperate hummingbird, and he wonders if it's possible to make oneself pass out simply waiting for another person to _say something, Steven_.  "You never said anything," is what Steve finally goes with. 

"Yeah. I was afraid if I brought up the dancing and taking you home, it might mess up the staying with you forever. Besides, you already lived at my place." Steve cracks a tiny smile at that. "You don't have to do anything about it. I just wanted you to know."

"What if I wanted to do something about it?" 

There's a fire running over Barnes's skin, lighting up every pore. "Do you?" 

Steve tilts his head to the side and the tiny smile turns into a smirk. "I asked you first."

Barnes laughs a little, because Steve hasn't left, he's not repulsed by the very idea. In fact, having seen Steve's terrible dates of the 1930s, this might be Steve's version of flirting. He thumps his chest, over the tags. "I think I made my position clear." 

Steve's face suddenly goes serious, and Barnes thinks for a moment that maybe it was the wrong thing to say, but then Steve leans across the table and touches his chest, right over his sternum. Barnes couldn't move for all of Hydra's purloined cash and a new arm. All the sensation in his body is fixed on that one point, where he marked himself with Steve and where Steve is touching him. 

"I want some," Steve says, and a sizzle like electricity but so much more pleasant lights him up, even though he knows what Steve means. 

"On the first date?" Barnes tries to look scandalized, but he's afraid he doesn't have that much control over his face right now. Probably whatever it's doing is much, much gooier. "Steve, I ain't that easy." He thinks about his memories of Bucky's dates and adds, "Anymore."

"Buck!" Steve pulls his hand back and leans back, face red, but he's laughing. "I meant I want your tags, like you've got mine. Ink 'em on my skin so I can't lose them, jerk."

"I know what you meant." But the thought of marking Steve's skin is infinitely satisfying. He remembers the dream he had about it and shifts a little, uncomfortably, because. Maybe he likes the thought a little too much. "You really want that, I'll ask Shuri how she's coming with the arm." He tilts his chin toward his left shoulder. "I could maybe do it one-handed but I use my left hand to brace and I don't want to leave you with any wonky lines." 

"I want it," Steve says without hesitation. "I want you to do it." 

Barnes ducks his chin, because the feeling welling up in his chest, under where Steve touched, is so vast as to be overwhelming. It is part happiness and part fear and part anticipation. He feels like he might come untethered and float away. 

Steve stands up and offers him a hand. Barnes takes it. They were standing closer than this a few minutes ago, but it's different now, the air charged with unrealized potential. They are still holding hands, but Steve at least has one free, and he reaches across the space between them and touches Barnes's face. He drags his fingers along the line of Barnes's jaw, to his throat. Steve swallows, and the distance between their bodies is unbearable. Barnes closes it and tips his head to the side, slants his mouth along Steve's. He hasn't kissed anyone in seventy years, and anyway, none of them were Steve. Barnes is hesitant, chaste, until Steve groans against his mouth and deepens the kiss, swiping his tongue over Barnes's lower lip. 

It's like some barrier inside Barnes breaks, and the electricity-but-not he felt earlier surges through him, lighting him up. He runs his hand up Steve's arm and over his back, pulling him tighter until their bodies are flush against each other, with no space for doubt, only heat. Steve is warm and solid against him, and he has held him dozens of times that he can remember, curled up next to him on cold nights when arguably as much of them was touching, but never when he was honest about all he wanted, and this is different, this is more. This is right. 

He slides his hand up Steve's back to curl around his shoulder, then down along his side, feeling the slide of Steve's shirt over the bulk of his muscle, and Steve makes a sound that is like a sigh but needier. Barnes wants to hear it again. He kisses away from Steve's mouth to his neck, down along the long muscles to his clavicle, where the collar of Steve's shirt is an impediment which Barnes considers the advantages of removing. 

"Steve." His voice is rough and low. 

"Yeah, Buck?" He notes with satisfaction that Steve's is no better. 

"There's a bed in the other room. I mean. I'm not in any rush, but if you wanted." He hooks his fingers in the collar of Steve's shirt. "I was thinking, if I'm going to put ink on you, I should scout out the terrain first." 

"That's the line you're going with?" 

 "I don't know, you're the tactical genius--you're telling me you'd go in blind?" 

Steve pulls him closer and kisses him again, sucks his lip into Steve's mouth. "Nope. Not going to argue at all," he says after a bit, and they retreat to the bed and neck like he'd wanted to when they were teenagers, like they have all the time in the world. 

In the end, it's quite a while before Barnes goes to find Shuri and ask about the arm. Steve ties his hair back for him before he goes.

* 

It takes about a week for Barnes to get everything he needs. The arm Shuri has for him is light and functional and not a weapon at all. It is more like a conventional prosthetic in that he can remove it; she makes a few adjustments to the cap on his shoulder so it's now an anchor point that she can use to make other arms. 

He gives her a sharp look. "I don't want one to fight with." 

She gives him a look back. "I hope you won't need one." But she doesn't make him any promises; he supposes she can't, not really.

He asks Shuri if he can get a tattoo machine and supplies and she laughs at him before pointing out how many Wakandans have tattoos and telling him _duh_. She is slightly more sympathetic when he explains why he wants it, but only slightly.

He does physical therapy to gain fine motor control and the degree of precision he wants with the new arm. He wears it when he wants and takes it off when he wants. He keeps working with Wanda. His progress is slow, but it's there, the words losing their power step by small step. Wanda can feel the happiness pouring out of him, and she tells him she is glad. 

Steve spends his days in meetings, often; with T'Challa, with the other former Avengers that are there. Sometimes he and Barnes have time to spend together, walking through Birnin Zana, or just talking about whatever bullshit springs to mind. Every night Steve comes back to him, and he is not dumb enough to think he deserves it, but he'll take it all the same. In all the things he wrote in his books, all that he wished for, this is better than he could have imagined. 

Steve brings him a stack of notebooks and pens and pencils. "I don't know what happened to the ones that you had in Bucharest," he says, "but if you want..." So sometimes Steve draws and Barnes writes, trying to recreate the protocols he built himself for bad days, because he doesn't for a minute think he's had his last nightmare or non-functional day just because he's happier than he's ever been. 

Finally he's satisfied that the arm will do what he wants it to, and that he's comfortable with the machine and inks that Shuri got for him. Some of the mechanisms are a little different, but not too much. Steve watches with no small amusement as he tattoos a grapefruit and then, without ink, part of his own leg to be sure he can operate the machine correctly. 

And then it is time to swallow down his sudden case of nerves and turn to Steve, already reclining shirtless on the couch. Barnes has tattooed a lot of other people, but this is Steve. He sets his ink and his other supplies out carefully. He shaves the sparse bronze hair on Steve's chest away, and places the transfer paper until they are both satisfied with it. 

"It's going to sting some," he tells Steve. "More over the bone." 

"I don't mind." Steve leans back, waiting. 

The buzz of the machine kicks up, the fresh needles loaded with black ink, and Barnes leans over to work, outlining his tags, leaving his name and the number he'd repeated under torture onto Steve's skin. He didn't bother with gloves since it was Steve, and he can feel the softness of his skin as he wipes away the excess ink and blood. It doesn't take long before he's finished, and Steve sits up to run his fingers over the tattoo that is twin--almost--to Barnes's. 

Barnes spreads ointment over the tattoo and lays plastic film down on top of it, then disposes of the needles and cleans the machine. Only then does he feel ready to turn to Steve and ask "So, what do you think?" 

Steve reaches up and pulls him down to kiss him enthusiastically, which is answer enough, but then he says, "I love it," into Barnes's mouth. "I can take you with me wherever I go." 

No, Barnes is ninety-eight percent certain that he doesn't deserve this, but he's one hundred percent certain that Bucky Barnes didn't deserve everything that brought him from standing at Steve's side in the war to the person he is now, so maybe it's not about deserving. And he doesn't know what the future will hold for them; so that makes him determined to hold onto today. 

He lowers his mouth back to Steve's and runs a hand down his torso, mindful of the new tattoo. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting close to the end, friends! I am taking a very liberal interpretation of the Russos's saying that Steve and Bucky's reunion in IW was not their first one. There's also some more about the non-weapon arm and goat farmer Bucky coming up before we get to the end. <3


	22. (as many holds as possible)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes finds his feet in Wakanda.

Barnes keeps his rooms in the palace for about three months, while he and Wanda and Shuri work on the trigger words. By the day of the final test, he's spent about a week listening to Zemo tell him not to move and completely ignoring him, sweeping Wanda around the dance floor in his mind, so his feeling about hearing the words again in real life is more healthy trepidation than stomach-churning fear. Wanda, Shuri, Steve, and T'Challa are all watching to see how he does as a man Barnes has met around the palace once or twice says the words in a flawless Russian accent.

To Barnes's great relief, the words are nothing more than words. It's just like when he and Wanda tried it before; there is no need to comply, no need to obey. He is freer than he has been since 1945. 

"No," he says out loud, and looks to the safety glass behind which his observers watch, huge grins splitting their faces. "Nothing." They're just a series of Russian words, no longer a chain to bind him. He feels lighter than he can remember ever feeling. Wanda's whoop is audible even through the glass, and within seconds Steve shoves through the door to crush Barnes against his chest. Barnes doesn't mind at all. The others are only moments behind, and Wanda and Shuri push past Steve to hug him too, while T'Challa contents himself with a hand to Barnes's shoulder. 

It's after that, when Steve and Wanda are out on a mission and he is occupying himself by assisting Shuri in her lab that the question of what he wants to do next comes up. 

"I don't know," he says, because he really hasn't considered it that much. He likes helping Shuri out, but he knows he's not really assisting so much as hanging about; he knows quite a lot about calculating angles of shots and lines of sight, and about where to hurt or kill another human being, but these are not skills he wants to use. He knows how to tattoo, and that's about it. If he wants to help Shuri, he needs a lot more education, because he can assemble a basic computer from parts, but what Shuri does is wildly above his current level of competence. "I want to contribute," he says after a moment's thought. "You've all done so much for me--I'd like to do something back." 

"Like what?" Shuri is deep into a three-dimensional projection of the comms in T'Challa's suit. She's always tinkering with the Black Panther gear, making it stronger, safer. Barnes understands the impulse; it had him scouting out the best perches from which to watch over Steve in the European theater. 

"Anything, really. Whatever needs to be done." He frowns and gives it a little more thought. "My work experience is a little limited, to be honest. I used to work unloading ships at the docks in the thirties."

"Wakanda is landlocked," Shuri says, deadpan, and he levels an unimpressed look at her. "You're not leaving anytime soon."  

"No," he says slowly. "I'm here for as long as you'll have me." There's not really a scenario he can envision where he leaves--everywhere else he'll have to hide, or most likely be tried as a war criminal.

"There's more to Wakanda than Birnin Zana." She twists her fingers to rotate the image in front of her. "You could go see rural parts of the country." 

So he does. The next time Steve and Wanda leave with Sam--the Accords may have hampered teams like the Avengers, but have done nothing to slow down enhanced villainy--Barnes sets off to see more of the country that's taken him in. T'Challa arranges for him to stay near a small village of the River tribe. He's never done any farming before, but he's got at least one strong arm and a willingness to learn. 

 He's also got a kimoyo bead around his wrist so he can communicate and navigate--if he decides to just walk across the country he can do it and not get lost, and the doctors in Birnin Zana can monitor his physical condition. He brings his prosthesis, but it's honestly easier to do without it sometimes. He likes that he has the option. 

His neighbors show him the best way to take care of his goats, how to wear clothes the way they do, how to sync the lights in his hut with his kimoyo, what to cook and how. Xhosa is not one of the languages he just knows, but he picks it up quickly, and his neighbors help him practice. The village children seem to find him fascinating, whether because he's white or because he's so painfully ignorant of the things they know and take for granted, he's not sure. They laugh and call him White Wolf, and a piece of him that he didn't know was aching heals, because they're not afraid of him.

There's a lot of physical labor involved in running the farm, but it's satisfying in its own way, tasks that can be solved with mere application of strength and time. He doesn't know that he's ever been anywhere as beautiful as this, and sometimes he stops just to watch mist rise off the river and wonder how Steve would draw it.

He doesn't have to wonder for too long; Steve comes to see him when he's been there about a month. He's trying to corral the goddamn goats again when a deep voice behind him calls out, "Need a hand there?" and he's already smiling before he turns. 

Steve looks good. Hair a little long, casual in jeans and a white t-shirt, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. No injuries that Barnes can see. Whatever he was off doing must have gone pretty well. "I don't know. I seem to mostly get along with just the one." 

Steve laughs and shakes his head. Barnes gives up on the goats and crosses the distance between them so he can pull Steve close and kiss him. Steve is warm and solid and here, and Barnes doesn't ever want to let him go. 

He could never have imagined this when they were two kids in Brooklyn: days and nights by a river in Africa with Steve, when touching him is not only allowed, but welcome. Just as the question of deserving is ultimately unimportant, the thoughts that creep through his mind of everything the two of them have been through being worth it to get to now are meaningless in the long run. What they suffered was just suffering, not of intrinsic worth in itself. 

They spend three lazy days at the village, Steve's attempts to help with the farm work entertaining the children just as much as Barnes's had at the beginning (and still sometimes do.) They swim in the river, chase the goats around; Barnes shows off his limited but expanding repertoire of meals he knows how to cook, which Steve eats with gratifying enthusiasm. They watch the stars, Barnes leaning back against Steve's chest, Steve's warm arms wrapped around him as he points out the constellations he can name in Xhosa. 

Through all of it he learns Steve's body in a way he's never known before, every plane and angle and line of him by touch: the slope of his iliac crest, the ridged muscles of his abdomen, the curve of his calf and how it fits in Barnes's hand. The smell and taste of him. What makes him shiver and sigh and come apart. Steve is learning just as much about him; hell, he's relearning himself. What he is when he is not a weapon. What it is to be loved. 

At the end of three days, Steve returns to Birnin Zana, and Barnes goes with him. 

"Are you coming back?" Esihle asks. She is one of the children that likes to hang around him. 

"I won't be gone too long," he tells her. "Will you look after the goats?" 

 She nods and gives Steve one last big-eyed look. 

Barnes looks back at his hut as they walk away; another place he can return to, more of a home now that he's shared it with Steve. 

*

Steve has a meeting with the other former Avengers, planning their next move. Barnes goes to see Shuri. 

"I have something to show you," she says, after leading him through an overly complicated handshake-fistbump-finger wiggle move that he fails to mimic to her satisfaction. She shakes her head and brings him a case. She unsnaps it and lifts the lid. 

It's an arm. Not like his current prosthetic, which is light and made of conventional materials, although the design and functionality are far beyond any prosthetic outside of Wakanda. This is black and gold, gleaming in its case like an object of art. But however beautiful she has made it, it's still a weapon.  

"What's it made out of?" 

"Vibranium." She flicks the end of one of her braids and levels a look at his shoulder, the cap and anchor point hidden beneath his wrap. "No one will be able to blast this one off of you, I promise."

He can't quite make himself thank her. "It's beautiful," he says, because that at least is objectively true. 

"Do you want to try it on?" 

"No." He forces out a smile. It probably looks off; her eyebrows climb. He wonders if she can feel the anxiety rising off him in waves. "Not right now. Thanks, though." 

Mercifully, she doesn't say anything to that, and he makes his escape. Steve is still in the meeting, so he wanders Birnin Zana. He's pretty familiar with the streets around the palace. He chooses a different route, consulting his kimoyo bead until he finds what he wants. 

The designs on the wall of the shop are different from the flash on the walls of Elena's shop in Bucharest. There's more abstract design and the birds and flowers are in a style very different from that he associated with sailors when he was a kid; thicker lines, brighter colors. There's no one at the desk, but when he peers around a wall, he catches a glimpse of someone working. The woman in the back room looks about his chronological age, and she is bent over a young man's arm, inking a series of geometric patterns in a band around his bicep. 

Barnes doesn't intrude, but goes back to the front and flips through the books of photographs on the counter, admiring the work. When he wants his next one, this will be a good place to go. He leaves without making an appointment, though, because he hasn't entirely settled on a design, and heads back to the palace. 

Between the walk and the tattoo shop, the surge of nerves that went through him at the sight of the arm has dissipated. He sends Shuri a message apologizing for freaking out and goes to their rooms--the same ones he had when he stayed at the palace before--to wait for Steve, who, as it turns out, is already there, reading a book on the couch. 

"Hey." He turns a brilliant smile on Barnes, and it feels like sunrise over the river. "Where've you been?" 

"Went for a walk." And then, because he can, he sits next to Steve and lets himself lean against him. "Shuri made me another arm." 

Steve puts his book down and wraps his arms around him, angling him until he can stroke one hand down Barnes's spine. "Like your old one," he guesses. 

"Yeah," Barnes says. They are quiet for a long moment while he thinks how he wants to put it. "If they need me, I'm gonna wear it. But I'm tired of fighting." 

"Yeah, Buck." Steve pulls him closer and drops a kiss on his temple. "I know you are." He doesn't say anything else; he's never once asked Barnes to come with him on the missions he and the rest of his team go on. Barnes turn his head and rubs his face against Steve's, then turns a little further so he can kiss him and run his arm down Steve's side.  

"How long," he mumbles against Steve's mouth. 

"A week until we leave again," Steve says. Barnes lets his fingers curl in Steve's shirt, tugging him closer as if there were any space left between them. He thinks he sees the shape of the future: his days here, or at the village, or somewhere else in Wakanda, maybe, if he likes, and Steve whenever he can have him. It's good. Maybe not as good as the two of them together always, but if Steve won't ask him to fight, he won't ask Steve to give it up. Maybe someday Steve will be ready to put the fight down on his own. Until then, he is content for the two of them to live in the interstices between confrontations. 

But Steve's here now. They have slid down until they are lying next to each other. Barnes turns them over so he is straddling Steve's hips, pinning him down; not coincidentally, this is the best way for Barnes to get his hand on him. Steve looks up at him from under his ridiculously long eyelashes, the start of a smile ticking up the corner of his mouth. Barnes spreads his hand flat on his chest and lets himself feel the beat of Steve's heart against his fingers, so much more regular and strong than when they were children. Then he slants his hand to the side, following the curve of Steve's chest, letting his thumb linger over his nipple until Steve's breath catches in his throat.

"You don't want to hear more about the meeting?" Steve says, teasing. His eyes are almost all pupil, and his hands are at Barnes's waist, sliding up. Barnes makes a little noise of his own before he gets his breath back. 

"You can tell me about it later," he says. "We've got time." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is from _Northanger Abbey_ by Jane Austen: "It is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible."
> 
> I realized as I watched the _Black Panther_ end credit scene while I was writing this chapter that I've wandered away from canon a little bit over the last couple of chapters, because it seems like Shuri and Bucky don't know each other that well in that scene. OOPS. However, I like the last couple of chapters more than I like that fifty second clip, so I'm sticking with what I've got. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I also think that, as much as I love Farmer!Bucky and his goats, our science nerd who was so pumped about the future would *also* love Birnin Zana, so him splitting his time between peaceful goat country and badass SF future city seems pretty reasonable to me.


	23. By the River, the Birds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barnes gets another tattoo.

Barnes isn't surprised when Romanoff comes back with Steve to Birnin Zana. He wonders, but doesn't ask, if she is still talking to Stark. If Stark knows that she was the one who let them escape in Germany. 

Steve's  happiness at her being there is like a fourth presence in their set of rooms; Barnes had come to meet Steve at the palace this time, leaving his goats in Esihle's care. Steve gets out his sketchbook, shows her his drawings of the village, of the goats. Of Barnes in his traditional dress. 

"It's a good look," Romanoff says, and smiles at him. If she is also laughing at them, at least a little, Barnes doesn't care. She's never done anything but help him, that he remembers. Whether it's for Steve's sake or his own, he doesn't know, but the end result is the same. He takes the chance to tell her so when Steve excuses himself to order dinner from the place they like with the best spicy red sauce. Steve will mangle the pronunciation of their order, but the delivery guy never minds. 

"In Berlin. I did recognize you," he ends up saying, and then wants to kick himself. That's not how he wanted to start this at all. 

She goes very still, obviously remembering, and he covers his face with his hand. 

"Let me try again." He doesn't usually blush like Steve, but right now his face feels like a camp fire. "I'm sorry for shooting you. I'm sorry for trying to choke you. This last time, I did recognize you. I just couldn't--I couldn't stop." 

"It's all right." Her mouth curves into a tiny one-quarter smile. "I actually have a pretty good understanding of doing things you wouldn't have otherwise."

"As easy as that?" He can barely meet her eyes, but he makes himself. They are a clear green, and he can't see any animosity in them. Of course, he wouldn't, no matter what she feels. 

"It wasn't easy," she says quietly. "Not for me, and not for you. You didn't have to spell it out for me to know that."

"Thank you." He turns his hand palm up-- _look at me, I'm unarmed_. "You've done a lot for me." 

"Somebody had to give you a chance." 

"Even Steve didn't _have_ to, but I'm glad you both did." She looks at him with an expression he can't read, but he's said what he needs to. "Are you staying?" he asks, and finds that he hopes the answer is yes. 

"Yeah." She leans back and looks at him. "Steve asked, so..."

"Good." He hopes she can tell that he means it. 

"Maybe one of these days I can come meet the goats." She tilts her head a little, and he thinks about the river, the children's laughter; how it felt to know that they were not afraid of him. 

"Yeah," he says. "You really should." 

*

"You don't have to come with me," Barnes says to Steve, in full confidence that Steve is coming with him. 

Steve levels him a flat look, and he smiles and nudges him with his right shoulder. They walk through Birnin Zana, Steve with his sketchbook tucked under his shoulder, Barnes with his hand tucked into his pocket. They get a few stares and double-takes, but Barnes has gotten used to that, and no one is rude about it. 

The older artist, Litha, is waiting for him when they get to the tattoo shop. Barnes has met with her a few times now, taking the drawing that Steve made for him. She made a few suggestions and they'd modified it accordingly. It's his first big piece, and in some ways he wishes he could do it himself, but he wouldn't be able to reach where he wants it to go. 

Of all his scars, the ones radiating out from his left shoulder are the ugliest. They drip like candlewax down his pectoral muscle and his back. Even Steve kissing them doesn't particularly make him want to look at them.  

The prep is familiar, cleaning and shaving the area to be tattooed, complicated only a little by the anchor point on his shoulder. Litha is good, talking to him as she does everything, even though she knows that he's done this before; making sure he isn't startled by anything, especially when she starts on the back of his shoulder. He tenses despite her gentleness, and Steve runs his hand down his flesh arm like he's soothing a nervous animal, then moves to help Litha center the transfer paper. 

"It looks good, Buck," he says, from behind Barnes's shoulder, his voice deep and sure. 

"Of course it does, you drew it." If either of them notice the wobble in his voice, they don't say anything.   

The buzz of the tattoo machine fills his ears, and he doesn't even flinch when the needles meet his skin as Litha begins to fill in the black lines. She starts at his lower pectoral muscle and works her way up, so he can see her progress, at least to begin with. Steve's hand is warm and pressing against Barnes's lax fingers, an anchor point of pleasant sensation against the buzzing pain of the needles. He has experienced much worse, but all of his tattoos before now have been relatively small. In this case, the pain, as low level as it is, just keeps going. He tucks himself against Steve on the non-buzzing side, and lets himself feel every bite of the ink into his skin. 

By the time Litha reaches his shoulder blade, his pectoral muscle has mostly healed. Litha wipes away the excess ink and blood as she goes but some crusts around the outlines she leaves. He doesn't mind. When Steve is not holding his hand, Steve's free hand curls against the center of his sternum, where Barnes's tags are marked on his chest, like he's remembering how it felt when Barnes tattooed him. 

"Do you need to take a break?" Litha asks when she is done with the outline. 

Barnes consults his jangling nerves and the pain that's settled into him. "No," he says. "I can keep going." Steve squeezes his hand. 

The shading and the color don't seem to hurt as much--he is not certain if it's because it objectively doesn't, or if it's only that he's gone a little numb with the repeated pain of the first round. Litha moves from the front of his shoulder to the back, gentle with the thin skin over his collarbone, and switches colors as she goes. He cranes his neck to follow her progress but when she gets to his back, he just watches Steve's face as he frowns in fascinated concentration, following her hands as she works. 

Finally, she wipes the last of the blood away and sets the tattoo machine aside. His left shoulder aches, but it is only skin-deep. A good pain; an intentional hurt. Steve squeezes his hand once more, and lets go. His fingers tingle without Steve's touch. 

Litha brings him a hand mirror and leads him to a bigger mirror set into the wall. "What do you think?" 

He turns and angles the hand mirror, taking in the bright band of color around the anchor point at his shoulder. Blue borders the metal, only a little brighter than the coat he'd once worn at Steve's side, undulating like a river, overlapping a band of geometric patterns. When he first discussed the design he wanted with Litha, she'd told him about the sankofa, a symbol of taking what was positive about the past into the present, and there it is: a small bird looking over its back toward his shoulder, cradling an egg on its back. There is a mirror to it over his shoulder blade, which he examines as well as he can with the hand mirror.

Above the sankofa, a firebird uncurls, its tail feathers sweeping up from the egg, its body curving not-quite-parallel to the metal anchor point. The wings arch up over his collarbone, the primary feathers stretching to the meat of his trapezius. Flames billow out along its wings, suggesting not only firebird but phoenix. Over his shoulder to his back, the flames darken into the vast expanse of space, purple pinpricked by the stars as he sees them from his hut in the village by the river. 

Steve holds the mirror for him to look, his eyes proprietary over the ink. He should be; he took Barnes's half-formed ideas and a deep dive through Ivan Bilibin's firebird illustrations and came up with the art Litha inked on him, a collaboration between the three of them. Barnes runs his fingers over the firebird, stinging and already itching with healing, and thinks about rebirth and the future. 

When they are back in their rooms in the palace, the new tattoo safely covered in ointment and plastic wrap, Steve smoothes the plastic. "Is this okay? Does it hurt?" 

"S'all right." Barnes rolls his shoulders. It does still hurt, a little, but not much; not any more. Not enough to make him want to ask Steve to take his hand away. 

He lifts his own hand up, next to Steve's, and drags his fingers over the birds. The scars are still there, beneath the image, but they are invisible to the eyes. He can only pick them out by feel. There's a satisfaction there, to hiding them in plain sight. No one will ever mistake the metal of his shoulder for anything innocuous, but the band of color around it feels like entirely new skin, like something just begun.

"Thank you," Steve says. Barnes looks at him and lifts an eyebrow. Steve turns slightly pink and runs his thumb very lightly over the wrap again. "For letting me be a part of this." 

There's really no response Barnes can make to that without sounding like the soppiest idiot to ever sop, so he pulls Steve close instead and kisses him. The best part of kissing Steve now is that they've done it enough that it feels comfortable and right as well as a spark that might incinerate him. He knows that Steve wants it; he knows that Steve wants him.

They end up on the bed, bodies canting into each other, Steve overly tender with the tattoo that is already almost healed. Barnes likes it: Steve's art, his skin--a declaration more straightforward than any words he could come up with. 

Though, there's something to be said for words too. When they pause for breath, Barnes leans into Steve's neck and tells his trachea, "I love you."  

Steve pulls him closer so their chests are flush, tag to tag, hearts beating if not in time, then from so small a distance. "I love you too, Buck." 

Barnes likes the sound of the name he used to have when Steve says it. He cups his hand around Steve's side, and lets his fingers slide into the ridges of Steve's abdominal muscles. 

"Tell me again," he says, and tightens his fingers on Steve's side. 

"I love you." Steve ghosts his finger along Barnes's ink; Barnes drags his tongue along Steve's neck, and in that moment, he decides that if he can choose to have a name, it ought to be the one Steve calls him most often. 

"Wherever you go," Bucky says, aware of how awkward he is, "you can come back to me. I'll be here." 

"I'd like that." Steve puts a warm hand on Bucky's shoulder and rests their foreheads together. "Coming home to you." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To quote the wiki article, the [sankofa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankofa) (bird looking over its shoulder with an egg on its back) "is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," which translates as: "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."" 
> 
> The Russian [firebird](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebird_\(Slavic_folklore\)): everyone wants to catch it, and it brings both gifts and curses to those who do. Also associated with the future. Steve looked at Ivan Bilibin's [firebird illustrations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarevitch_Ivan,_the_Firebird_and_the_Gray_Wolf#/media/File:Firebird.jpg) for inspiration.
> 
> * * *
> 
> So this is it, pals! Thank you so much for reading along with me. I honestly can't tell you how much your kudos and comments have meant to me--writing this way has been really invigorating, and I thank you all. <3 (Also, I have never planned a story out and had the number of chapters end up equal to when I plotted it out, so apparently this story has some kind of energy convergence or something.)
> 
> Whether I write a for real part 2 will probably depend a lot on where canon goes in Endgame, *but* I do have some dvd extras and deleted scenes that didn't quite fit into the main storyline that I want to write, so sometime soon there will be a few one-shots set in this verse. Along those lines, if there's anything you want to see in this verse (Sam and Bucky hanging out? Nat meeting the goats?), let me know, and it could end up in the extras. 
> 
> I am on [tumblr](https://deisderium.tumblr.com/) and also I made [a twitter](https://twitter.com/deisderium) for screeching about MCU related shenanigans should you wish to join me there. 
> 
> Thank you again for reading. <3 <3 <3
> 
> ETA: I have made a little [drawing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17002089) of Bucky's tattoo if you want further visuals. :D


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